Category Archives: running

Running.

I’m training for the Oakland half marathon in March. I have not been super good about being consistent about what I’m doing when. Yesterday I went out for a four mile run. I was very proud of myself because I consciously went kind of slow for the first mile. It took me ~ 13:48 to do the first mile. By the end of the fourth mile my overall average was down to 12:46?8? Can’t remember the last digit.

That means I picked up a lot of speed over the last three miles. Usually my first mile is by far my fastest and I slow down from there. I hardly ever ‘warm up’. I felt pretty proud of myself. And I stopped and arranged a play date with the neighbor kids Shanna has been asking about. *pat self on back*

Long term I would like to maintain the general fitness level where I can run five miles in an hour or three miles in thirty minutes. I would like to be doing ten mile runs on Saturday mornings just as a matter of course. Ideally long term I will develop the habit of having a Tues/Thurs/Sat/Sun schedule of doing 5/3/10/3 miles. (The Sunday one is a walk to the farmers market and not a run.) I think that is more or less my goal.

back to “normal”

By which I mean that Noah returned to work and I returned to days alone with the kids. We’ve had a couple good days in a row. On Thursday I made the kids go for a mile run with me in the morning (we did laps around the elementary school parking lot across the street so that everyone could go at their own pace). Then there was a lot of playing with art stuff. I moved the coffee table into the living room after years of banishment to the garage and they are dramatically increasing their random art play.

Then a neighbor kid came over for a play date. Then she left. Later a different (much older) neighbor kid came over to babysit while I went out and exercised more. I ran/walked three miles then came home and got my bike and rode that for another five miles. The day in total covered about nine miles. (Yesterday I rested.)

I was in a much better mood after the exercise.

Friday we didn’t get up and do lots of exercise. I spent the day cleaning house, reading, and chit chatting. I didn’t do much playing with them. I talk to them about their games while they are playing but I don’t really do the imaginative games with them very often. I will be random “outside the game” funny commentary.

Both days involved the kids barely yelling. There was a singular argument where they had trouble resolving a toy sharing issue per day. “Try again” worked just fine.

“Try again” “Asked and Answered” “What do you think should happen here?” Those are my stock phrases these days to avoid fighting. Very helpful.

The tally marks for yelling is helping a lot. The kids really want to pick breakfast. Today I’m going to make breakfast and I think the kids are going to get to decide. No, they haven’t had a day completely free of screaming yet but they’ve managed several days in a row of just one brief exclamation of emotion. I can fudge a teeny bit. They are three and five. They are doing well for them. They are trying really hard.

I struggle with dividing my attention between Noah and the kids when he is home all day for a while. He wants me to be a very different kind of person than they do. It is hard to meet all of the expectations at once. The kids are so much easier to spend time with when I can focus on them.

And we get along better when I’ve caught up cleaning the house (I have–I’m pretty happy with myself) so that it only takes the kids 5-15 minutes to clean up their stuff before they can move on to another big, messy activity. If there is one hard to clean project out at a time I’m usually nice enough to help clean up. If there are six I’m kind of an asshole. “No. I told you to clean it up as you went because that makes it easy. You ignored me so you get to untangle this. I’m reading.”

When we go through toys for donations I usually put them in the back of the van and drive them around for a month or so before I get to the donation center. I’m glad for this policy because sometimes the kids decide to get rid of stuff they aren’t really done with. I thought Calli was kind of crazy for wanting to get rid of the My Little Pony characters. Given that the only fighting we have done in the last two days has been over Shanna’s MLP we are getting the others out of the donation bag. I think that even if Calli has decided that Rainbow Dash is a butthead (Calli is very judgmental about how RD acted in a particular episode and she’s carrying a big grudge) she needs to keep the doll. She needs to have more than one that is hers so she doesn’t steal Shanna’s. Ok fine, Rarity is better. I hear you. You asked for Rainbow Dash so don’t steal your sister’s.

Sometimes I feel kind of baffled that this is what I really really want from life.

Shanna and I have been spending a lot of time talking about how much it sucks to try to learn self control. I agree that it is sucky to try and learn. I agree up one side and down the other. We still have to do it. I love you, baby. You can do it even though it is hard. It may take a while and anyone who expects you to be perfect at five is a big jerk and you don’t need to listen to them. By the time you are twenty I won’t be very patient with these things though. Just so you know.

Unconditional love and very conditional approval. “I will get mad sometimes about your behavior. You get to decide how you feel about that. Sometimes you will care and sometimes you won’t. Sometimes it is a good idea to ignore me and sometimes that’s a really bad idea. You won’t learn which is which until you try and you don’t like the results.”

Since I stopped tracking the books I was reading I’ve kind of exploded in reading. I think I’ve read twelve books. Only a few were blessed rereads. These Tamora Pierce books are popcorn. They are fun and really sweet. I’m looking forward to when my kids can read them. I’m going to have to buy my own copies because my friend wants her copies back for her own daughter. Sheesh. How unreasonable. (That’s my “kidding” voice.)

I haven’t read the new Dorothy Allison book yet. I may read that before I start the Immortals 4-some. I’ve been alternating between books I borrowed from K, books I borrowed from L, and really depressing psychology books. Well, suicide stuff. Is it depressing? I’m not sure. I’m looking for hope.

There has to be a way to get my brain to stop telling me I’m a worthless whore other than being stoned all the time. I’m the first one to admit that pot stops most of the repetitive negative thinking. Not 100% of it but I think it cuts out at least 80%. That is probably the most striking difference. (I medicated some for the past two days compared to having a week off. I didn’t medicate “fully” but I had a little. Fully medicating is 4-5 pills in a day. I’ve been having one.)

And I even managed to hit quota in December. I think it had been almost six months since I hit quota. When I get around to writing about sex being problematic then Noah feels the need to up his game. To both of our benefit. I think I’ll keep writing about it. I know that back in the old days when I was having sex with different people just about every day of the week I didn’t need a lot of foreplay. I agree that those were wonderful days. These days I don’t spend much time thinking about sex and I need more transition time and attention. Life is annoying like that. If you want to fuck me for the next fifty years you may have to change what you do over time. I am not that sprightly 23 year old just out of a sexless relationship where I felt teased but not satisfied all the time anymore.

Next month, February, marks the ten year mark since I met Noah. Time flies when you are having fun.

Today Noah is home and our routine is “disrupted” again. It’ll be ok. Maybe we will visit a martial arts studio near our home today. I’ll look at schedules. I want us, as a family, to go watch all of the studios within 4 miles of our house over the next few weeks. Then we can discuss which style looks best for us. By the end of this month I think we need to be enrolled.

Just keep swimming, right? (Swim lessons restart on Wednesday.) Park days don’t restart for another week because the home school group has a neat activity in Berkeley next week and I’m lame and won’t drive north for activities twice a week. Don’t have the spoons.

No plans for this weekend. It seem smart.

Ok, stomach… get ready.

It’s the day! Almost our last social obligation of the year. I’m excited. We aren’t leaving the house between Christmas and New Years.

It is weird how anxiety works. I’m looking forward to seeing people but man my stomach hurts.

At the home school holiday party I said, “Man I’m whiny today. I’m sorry.” Another mother countered with, “How is that different from any other day?” I don’t think I will speak when that person is standing within 10′ of me any more.

This is the kind of thing I over react to. Ok, if I’m that unpleasant then I will work hard to make sure you don’t have to acknowledge that I exist any more.

But she didn’t say I was awful. She said I was whiny. This is a true statement. I am.

Sometimes Noah asks why I don’t punish the kids for whining. Because I don’t punish for things I model. That’s just how it rolls in this house.

There was also a noticeable amount of discussion as to how sad it was that a certain blog reader and 3/5 of her kids weren’t there. (We never get the other 2/5.) I told people that I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a rejection of the group for being sucky. Spoons can only stretch to cover so many activities.

Part of what I like about hosting events is I get to introduce my friends to one another. I know really neat people.

2013 has been one of the best, most stable years of my entire life. If I can’t get my anxiety under control under these circumstances I’m fucked.

I often go back and forth in my head, “My friends deserve to know me sober. Because being sober is always superior to being a loser drug addict. But wait! You are talking like a schizophrenic about to stop taking their meds. Maybe this is a bad plan.”

Don’t worry. I won’t try to do this sober. I haven’t been practicing enough to do an event of this size alone yet. I would spend the party in my bedroom crying and shaking if I tried.

That feels really pathetic. God I’m a loser. Bravery isn’t about feeling no fear. It is about performing to spec no matter how terrified you are. Having a holiday party shouldn’t be terrifying but it is.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter what “should” be true. It matters what is.

I’m going to have to spend pretty much all of next year working on being able to do this sober. I’m going to have to be able to handle any size of crowd unassisted before 2015 or I can’t take the kids on the road trip. You’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.

Tomorrow. I’ll work on that tomorrow. Next year. All of next year. Not today.

Sometimes I feel guilty when I say “not today–I’ll do that later.” My only consolation is I do usually get around to doing it… or it wasn’t important to begin with.

It is nice to see that I do the things I say I will. Not every single thing–I don’t make that many promises on purpose. I have to figure out sober again.

I used to be sober. I managed my PTSD without meds for most of my life. It has meant a lot of isolating in order to calm my ambient stress. I don’t get that now that I have kids.

I have to teach them to be part of my lower stress or I’m fucked. This sounds hard and scary.

Bravery doesn’t mean never feeling scared. It means you keep your ass moving even when you are scared. I can do that. I can keep moving.

I think today will be fun. I think I will be glad I did it even though it creates stress too.

I thanked Noah and the kids for helping me clean the house. I told them that it is important to me to once in a while have a clean house and a party and I appreciate that they did work towards that even if it isn’t important to them.

I was only an asshole about the cleaning for maybe 10 hours total and it wasn’t all yesterday it was over a week. That’s not great but it isn’t as bad as it could be.

In my head I have this tally sheet. I know how harsh I have seen some mothers be. I’m not on the harsh end of what I have seen. I have seen some seriously brutal people though. I like being on the nicer end of the scale. I don’t even know why I want it so bad but I do.

If I can’t get my kids to cooperate by being nice to them then I think the cooperation I get through being an asshole is suboptimal. Sometimes I’m a fucking self absorbed asshole and I do it. I try really hard to avoid it though.

Life involves work. I need my kids to not be the kind of people who sit back and watch while work is being done. I need for them to be the kind of people who say, “There is work to be done? Where do I start?”

I very consciously don’t give them much bullshit work day-in/day-out through the year. I really don’t have a lot of make work. I don’t make them live in a perfectly clean house all the time (ha!). I enforce daily teeth cleaning, underwear changing, and they have to set the table for meals. That’s what I really enforce on a daily basis.

I need for them to grow up in an atmosphere where it is fine to not do much most of the time and sometimes you have to chip in. You just do.

I don’t know how to inspire this very well though. I always resort to bullying and crying at some point. It’s pretty fucking lame. I try to recognize when I am bullying, retract the statement and walk away. “I should not have said that. I’m sorry I was such a jerk.” Usually that comes in the form of a threat to throw away anything that isn’t picked up. It’s not a cool threat. I’m an asshole for saying it. Just because I feel it that doesn’t excuse me saying it.

I tried really hard to not fuss at the kids. I wasn’t fully successful but I tried. I need to try harder. It isn’t their fault I want things. I try to let them know, “There isn’t a good reason I want this. I just want it. Will you please help me?” Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. It is hard to manage my emotional reaction to being turned down.

Right now it is part of that whole, “If I do not know the answer will be ‘yes’ then I don’t have the spoons to ask for help” problem. I get into these cycles. As the people I live with the kids have to deal with the results of what happens when I can’t handle a no and I get one any way. Mostly I go in my room and shut the door and cry.

Which makes me feel like a manipulative piece of shit.

I try to not-react as much as possible. I know that I’m supposed to maintain a neutral state over here on my own but I’m shite at that. I’m trying.

Like the woman letting me know that I whine every day. Oh. Shit. Ok I guess the solution is to just stop talking. I don’t know what else to do.

I don’t think I can stop talking entirely. That would kill me. But I can make sure I don’t bother you any more. I’m sorry my existence is such a trial to you. I’m not even being sarcastic. I am annoying. I’m sorry. I don’t really know how to change that I am this difficult.

Some people are easier than others. I don’t even just mean the sex. Not that I’ve been easy to have sex with lately. Poor Noah. Our sleep cycles are totally out of alignment and we’re tired and over-committed and having kids is an impediment. Life happens.

This phase isn’t permanent–right?

Just keep moving. If you are still alive there is always a chance that things will change. If you want things to be different, just keep moving. Just because I can’t do something today that means nothing about ten years from now.

Right now I can’t play any musical instrument. That could change. I don’t sew. Some day I might. Right now Noah thinks there is no chance he will ever be a distance runner. It’s not his favorite. But if he wants to keep eating cookies with me at the rate we are going through them… I think it could happen.

If he wants to have a long, sex-filled life with me we will have to do some more exercise. I’m told it is good for you. We have no physical disabilities so we don’t have good excuses. (There are good reasons some people can’t run. I’m not acting like this is universally applicable…)

I have a lot of time ahead of me. I can figure out how to do a lot of things. I read something cool this morning about how great artists often go through big revivals in their 80’s.

I have spent most of my life believing I would die fairly young. But if I want to find out what Shanna is like on her 60th birthday I have to not die until well into my 80’s. I should plan for that. I should consciously try to get there. I should work at it. And then Calli is even two years behind that.

I want to see what their lives will be like. I don’t want to just witness their childhood and feel sad all the time that no one loved me as a child.

What will they do with their adulthoods? How will they inspire me? I’m sure they will.

Just keep moving. Keep introducing them to interesting people. I know so many neat people. I know people who do the fucking coolest stuff. I like basking in their glow. I like getting to be an audience. I should stay alive and keep doing that.

Today I will manage my anxiety and see friends. My kids will get to see a lot of different kinds of people. It is rare that I cross the streams like this. Home schoolers, perverts, geeks, and dancers. Who knows what the results will be like. I think everyone will be child-appropriate. I think people will be polite and wonderful. I think that sometimes questions will be answered in surprising ways. That’s for the best.

It takes all kinds in this world. My friends are Christians, Jews, atheists, Hindus, Buddhists, and pagans. I don’t have any friends who are practicing Muslims but it’s not on purpose. At least no one has chosen to share with me that they follow that religion.

I thought about name tags. “Hi my name is ________. I know Krissy/Noah through ___________.” That would be awesome for me. I would enjoy how people self-identify. Ha. “Burning Man. Uhhhh…. that’s it…. I know them through Burning Man.” Not that I (Krissy) have gone. But I know a lot of Burners. And many people that I think of in other categories would probably self-identify our friendship that way because it sounds more child safe.

I’m not going to put anyone more on the spot than I have to. Not today. I don’t have the spoons to manage.

It will be a good day. Time to stop typing.

Be thankful

Yesterday one of my favorite people asked me what I am thankful for. (Other than her of course. Even if she does split my personality.)

I’m thankful for so much. I’m thankful for my husband and my kids and my house and my yard and my life.

I’m thankful that I have a Dad now who wants me to come see him for holidays. I didn’t spend holidays with a Dad for more than 25 years.

I’m thankful that I can break contact with my biological family and not end up alone for the rest of my life. That was what I expected. That is why most people don’t maintain no contact. The being alone is too hard.

I’m thankful for all the beautiful flowers I have been able to plant in my yard. I am looking forward to next spring. I feel antsy and joyous about seeing all the bulbs come up. Next spring when the tulips and narcissus and wildflowers (a “variety” bag of seeds) and marigolds and hydrangeas and lilies and roses and blue potato vines all bloom I will get to sit outside and know that I’m allowed to pick those flowers if I want to. I’m allowed to look at them as long as I want to without creeping anyone out. I’m allowed to be here.

I’m thankful for that. I didn’t expect to ever have this feeling. This is my home.

Shanna told me yesterday that she was nervous about going to Portland because she doesn’t want to leave Wonderland. “But this is my home. It won’t be the same to sleep somewhere else. I will feel like I’m not as safe.”

I asked her what about Wonderland makes her safe. She said, “Wonderland is magic because it is so full of love. No where else has as much love.”

I just about burst into tears. I did that. I made that come true for someone else. I’m thankful for that.

She eventually decided that since I was going with her the love would come with her and she can consent to the trip. Oh good.

This morning before we go I will churn the custard into ice cream and put it in the freezer (we had a bunch of milk and cream and eggnog–my life is made of awesome). I have more bags to throw in the back of the van. We have food to eat before we leave. But mostly we are ready to go.

I packed yesterday. The older I get the harder time I have doing my packing in advance. It doesn’t help that my kids and I each have less than a week of warm-ish clothes. So I had to wash and pack absolutely at the last minute because… that’s all the clothes I have.

Ok, I have more warm weather clothes. I could go at least two weeks without doing laundry in the summer. In the winter I have about six days of clothes. It’s all coming to Portland.

I’m thankful that I once again have a washer and dryer in my garage. Witness my happy dance of joy.

I’m thankful for every person who works at Apple creating the products that make my life better.

I’m thankful that I can decide to go on a four mile run uhhh jog energetic walk and my body is able to carry me through. I am so glad I have the strength to get through the distance even though I am not fast. It is a step in the process. Not everyone is able to do what I can do. I’m thankful for the strength in my body.

For a large portion of my “runs” I act like a whack job extra who got off the set of Swing Kids. I like dancing down the side walk. It’s a lot of fun.

I think it is funny that I so strongly reject the label of “dancer” because I dance all the fucking time. I love to dance. I just can’t be part of the dance community any more. I know too many rapists there. Not my own–thankfully. That community was easy on me. But I take sides. I have had too many women come to me with the stories of what is happening to them. I can’t pretend it isn’t true or real.

I can’t let the rapists touch me. I can’t be nice to them. I can’t pretend we are friends. I also don’t have the right to confront them. It isn’t my story.

I’m thankful that I can flee from communities and still have friends.

At this stage of my life I don’t get to complain much about what is happening to me. I am safe. I am loved. I am thankful for that.

I’ll finish Outrunning in another day or two. I feel scared and like it is the right thing to do.

One of the ladies on one of my sex abuse support forums (I have such a cheerful life) was relaying a case in her community. An 11 year old girl pregnant by a 15 year old boy. Neither of the kids knew you could get pregnant the first time. Now the boy is in jail for rape even though it was consensual sex.

Do I believe that an 11 year old can consent?

Does it matter if it was consensual? How would their lives be different if they had read a nice book by a weird lady telling them to use two forms of birth control even for the first time you have sex? Would that have helped?

Well, whether or not an 11 year old is ready for sex is debatable. It is not debatable that she is not ready to be a mother. No one is at 11. Your brain isn’t ready to treat someone else as more important than you.

I will try to publish. Even though it is scary. I believe it is the right thing to do. I don’t want to micromanage how people run their lives. I want them to have more information before they make decisions. I want them to understand the choice they are making before they make it. I’m not sure if I can fully help them with that but I can give them some of the first inklings. I can give them some of the outlines of what they need to know.

I’m thankful for all of the people who have written books that I have been fortunate enough to read. I’m so glad I know the things I know. I like my brain.

As I get older I’m not even as angry about being raped. I learned so many things about myself and about human nature. I don’t think I would have been able to learn those lessons from a book.

I feel really bad for the people who raped me. They are all people who are so full of hurt they are incapable of seeing how they hurt other people. I am thankful I am not like them. I am thankful that I can see the hurt I cause. I am grateful that it is not invisible to me. It seems like that would be a terrible burden. I don’t want to be unaware.

How can you be considerate if you are unable to tell how your actions effect people?

I am thankful that despite lots of good reasons to be dead inside I am not. I can feel. I can be sad and angry and happy and joyous and miserable. Not everyone gets to have the full range. (Sometimes I wish my range was spread out a bit more over time but you can’t have everything.)

I like my body. I am learning to be grateful for my brain. I have a great brain. It has allowed me to do a wide variety of neat things.

Go forward. Do your best. It’s all you can do.

(I’m really not mad, Pam. I get why you say what you do to your mom. I love you to the moon and back.)

empty brain, go work.

I am not sure I will 100% finish the play structure today but I will finish painting. Damnit. I’m not painting the base boards because they are already nasty filthy. Oh well. The rest of it is Colorful. Pictures soon. Holy moly colorful. Structure of many colors. At least fifteen colors so far and I think I may use a couple more. Today I paint the rock wall. Woo! I will also make sure I get the roof on. Maybe I will do that before I start painting. Not many boards left!

After I finish the play structure I need to take a break from outside work and come inside and dismantle my laundry room. This is my sad face. Luckily I construct my projects with the idea that if I make 3,028 trips then everything is easy for me to carry by myself without destroying my back. Yay! So it will be annoying and time consuming but not painful. Cause I’m S_M_R_T.

Once that is done I need to paint the arbor. Then I can move on to other, currently more appealing, work. Like spreading mulch! I have so much wonderful mulch. *happy dance* My whole forking yard will be covered which is awesome sauce because I have this terrible clay.

I still haven’t moved the rocks. I should probably ask Noah to help me do that today. I’m more than a little afraid that if I get all macho and try to do it alone I *will* throw out my back. My back and I are not on the best of terms right this minute. Gentle work.

I opened negotiations with my two favorite running buddies for a half marathon next year out of state. Ten years of running deserves a celebration. And who doesn’t like a trip to Portland? We’ll get to see lots of fabulous people. Always a win.

I haven’t worked on the book in a week. I’m tired. My brain hurts. I need to finish the bloomin’ painting outside so I can come inside and start nice gentle inside winter work and let my forking back heal. But I need to be running. I think it is weird how much I crave the running now.

Something else I’ve been thinking about like crazy. One of the moms of many in our home school group made a comment this week to the effect that when her fifth child is born she is going to get rid of all hand-me-downs because she is done having kids. I almost burst into tears. She’s allowed to have as many kids as she wants and I’m only allowed to have two so why is she stopping?!!?!?!?!?!? Ahem. Obviously I didn’t say a word to her. But I had this explosion of feelings I’ve been processing since. I started bleeding yesterday which was welcomed by my now-standard sobbing because it feels like I just lost a wanted baby. Noah’s shooting blanks so I will never miscarry again. But every month feels like it.

On the upside I didn’t have an explosion of joint pain in the 24 hours before I started bleeding. Phew. That means it only happened two months in a row and I can ignore it and not see a doctor. My favorite kind of random pain.

On the downside my right arm hurts like a son-of-a-bitch. I woke up in the middle of the night with my elbow hurting. Painting is hard on my arm. I’ll be done soon. I’ll take a few months off at least. Then I’ll start painting the inside of my house. Mostly I want to be able to get rid of all the paint so I need to finish the projects I have in my head. I’d like to use the storage space for other things.

So far I have only learned a few minor points of argumentation from Sex at Dawn. I remain convinced that I went out and got a graduate level education on sex. I just know shit. It’s nice to feel that confirmed so strongly occasionally. “Oh look, a groundbreaking book that teaches me nothing new. Guess I’m already doing the groundbreaking.” Ha! Not that I have a big ego or anything. *cough*

I’m trying to not fret about money. I haven’t overspent our income. I have saved. I have paid down debt. I just also bought things I wanted. I bought things my family and friends will use and appreciate for many years. I wish I didn’t feel so much guilt. My shrink wants me to work on that guilt because it is specifically non-useful to me. Noah doesn’t feel I am extravagant in my spending and his opinion is the only one that matters, except for mine, when it comes to my spending. So stop feeling guilty. But so many Mint categories are red! (They will even out by the end of the year.) Clearly I am a bad person! Err, maybe I have some issues.

I keep busy because it is better than sitting still all day and crying. I’m trying to feel cheerful about the work instead of cranky. This is all self-imposed and self-created work. I do it just because I want to do it. That means I should be pleasant to be around. I am the cock crowing at the top of the dung heap of self-important work. Seriously. I should be in a good mood. But my body hurts.

Balance. I need more of this balance stuff. How do I use my body without causing it intense pain all the time? No clue. But I’m pretty sure it involves more yoga.

Some day when we don’t have a mortgage to pay for… if we are still so rich… I want to take weekly yoga classes and get massages twice a month. That would be so freakin rad. It could theoretically start in 2021 when we come back from travel. *cross fingers* I can hold out that long. Really it isn’t so long in the scheme of things. It is such a dreamy future. I can work for that.

When I am older and my kids don’t need as much from me I look forward to a much more selfish life. I will eventually do some kind of work with other people out of loneliness but I look forward to being able to care about my body a lot more than I do now. Maybe future self will be convinced to be nice to me? It’s a dream. Arms hurt. Stop typing, you fool.

Just another whinging Friday

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……

Empty the brain.

Still to do:

  • blackberry bush
  • clean house (Monday–this weekend is resting)
  • upload pictures (in progress) (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rightkindofme/sets/72157634785800521/with/9426289945/)
  • write descriptions (I don’t actually want to do this)
  • this weekend (or Monday) it is time to make pasta sauce. I have fresh frozen tomatoes, canned whole tomatoes, frozen home made paste–next load of tomatoes is for sauce.
  • take kids to water park
  • get over belief that everyone hates me and go back to park day
  • work on books again
  • start running again (DSH–Blacksheep says she is down for a half marathon in Portland in October 2014. 😀 Am I going to be able to talk you into a road trip? My Dad would probably be happy to help the awesome BlackSmithGuy with kids during the race so he isn’t stuck with all six girls. Man. Don’t we want to get all six girls together?!)
  • Pick up load of beef from K. Mmmm beef.
  • Make mead. It’s August. It’s time. (It doesn’t make my stomach hurt and pretty much ALL OTHER ALCOHOL is poison. I should make more.)
  • Start cleaning/preparing the backyard for birthday parties. I have less than four weeks. We are having two birthday parties for Calli because she is adamant about not wanting a big party (she broke down in tears at the thought) but she has enough “friends” that she can’t figure out how to narrow down the list. That’s ok. Some people are available during the week on your actual birthday and some people are available on Saturday. It’ll be fine. (And most of the party “decoration” stuff is available online for free because apparently Disney is totally happy to support people having Jake and the Neverland Pirates parties without spending money.)
  • Resign self to birthday with just girls.

Really a lot of what has been going on for the past couple of days is I am missing my mom. I wish my mother was proud of me so much that it hurts. It is probably in the top three reasons I cry all the fucking time. I wish I could stop caring. I really wish I could. But I don’t want my children to stop caring about me so I don’t really see how I can model not caring about your mother and get anything different.

Part one of the English class I am teaching is over. Hindi class is over. Thank goodness. I am so tired and over scheduled I feel like shit all the time. We will do Hindi class again but I need a break. I have four more weeks of teaching English once a week. I’m having fun with the kids. They say they have picked up some useful stuff. I’m particularly enjoying the one girl who seriously came for a writing workshop. She’s producing 5-8 pages per week and she wants major feedback. I can do that! YES! I feel useful in a way I don’t get to feel very much.

Mostly I think the things inside my head are stupid and pointless and not worth knowing–that’s why I know them instead of people who are smart and who matter. Once in a while I find out that something inside my brain is useful. It’s a very powerful feeling.

“Why do you need to see a therapist?” “You know how I cry all the time. It’s not because of you. You are the best thing that has ever happened in my whole life. But a long time ago my life wasn’t this awesome. Apparently I still need to cry about it.”

I don’t cry every single day but I probably cry more than 75% of days. I have control over the anger these days… not the crying. I used to be able to control the crying and not the anger. I don’t know if this is progress or not. It is certainly different than I was when I was younger.

For the first twenty five years of my life crying was very dangerous, but I had a lot to cry about. I would say that more than half of the times I have been hit in my life it has been as punishment for crying. I’ve been hit a lot. I could not begin to count it all. So many people. So many times.

I have so much to cry about. Why am I so bad that I don’t deserve to have a mom who will protect me? Yesterday I read about a case where an adult woman seduced a 14/15 year old boy (that’s RAPE, my friends) and after she got out of jail (because that’s rape and she’s a rapist) she sued for custody of the baby she had as a result of being a rapist and is not requiring her 15 year old rape victim to pay child support.

Because being a rape victim never fucking stops. And the baby? The child born of rape? That’s the one I pick out of that scenario to identify with. No one wants children born of rape. They are treated like shit for their entire lives. They don’t get to forget that them being here on this planet is the tangible result of something terrible happening.

I feel so insecure and yet so sure that the parenting choices I am making are the only ones I can make. I feel so ashamed of myself that I can not be more like other people. I can’t. It is too late for me to join a herd.

I have caught up on the internet. I should probably leave the screen off today. I haven’t read much in a month.

I did make schedules!

I sat down yesterday with a pen and paper and tried to figure out how I’m going to get everything done in the next month that I want to get done. Holy crap for Krisco. I won’t be blogging very much. But I am working on part two.

 

It’s hard to figure out how to tell this story. I still know a lot of these people and I like them. I think the most important thing for me to do with this is not try to tell exactly what happened because memories differ and get a piss off an awful lot of people but if I make it just different enough that obviously it’s not precisely what happened then maybe people won’t hate me. Part of how I am doing this is amalgamating people. It’s kind of funny to look around in my mind and who are the people who were really important to me when I was 18 in 19. How can I combine them into useful characters without making everyone hate my guts. How can I tell the truth?

 

I don’t need to write exactly what happened to day by day because that is the point. The point is that I was a very damaged person and I managed to find a very safe environment in very specific ways. It was only safe because I consciously and deliberately needed safe. It was also an area of great risk.

 

My experience of the sex community was that these were not the beautiful people. I want to write about them honestly because I don’t think the world needs another book about how pretty everyone is while they have sex. I’m not pretty. Yet when I showed up at the public BDSM community I was thinner and a lot prettier than most of the other women there. I want to honestly describe the people I knew without making them feel bad about themselves. I want to write about people of lots of different sizes and colors without being an asshole.

 

Well, time to go run.

Just emptying my head.

Babysitting was wonderful and very hard. By the end of the weekend I was so tired I could barely hold myself upright while I sat. I got 2.5 hours of sleep on Saturday. That makes it sound so much worse than it was.

The kids are one and three. The three year old is autistic. That does change the parameters of dealing with him. On one hand I feel like a big asshole for reminding myself all the time that he is autistic–I should just like him for who he is and not worry about his diagnosis.

I didn’t worry about whether or not my shaman was autistic when I got to know him 12 years ago. But now that I know he is autistic it helps our relationship for me to know that. It changes how I present information. It changes how impatient I allow myself to get.

Those skills translate nicely to this little boy. It helps that he is one of the sweetest things on two legs. When he freaks out (every 20 minutes for the first few hours) it is clearly sad and scared. There is no anger anywhere near him.

I think that hanging out with my shaman has allowed me to finally understand that men and boys can be scared and sad without being angry. I don’t get sad or scared without also getting angry. It kind of blows my mind that other people don’t get angry out of self-defense when they feel sad or scared. I am having to change my behavior very consciously because people are not feeling what I would expect to feel in that situation.

At this point I have my patter down pat with him. “I agree with you that you need your mom! You have the best mom in the whole world! Of course you need her. She will be back to get you soon; I promise. Until then would you like to cuddle with me? I’m not as good as your mom but I love you very much and I would be honored if you let me take care of you while she is gone.”

He smiles and hugs me. I’ve been cuddling with him since before he was a year old. Even though he is sad and scared he trusts me. It blows my mind. No matter how hard this is to get through at the time the later-effects of being proud of myself for being good and taking care of him properly do wonders for my self-esteem.

His sister is much much easier than him even though she isn’t a low-needs sort of baby. My wonderful friend got two very high needs kids. I think she is a saint for managing.

The baby isn’t used to sleeping in a bed without walls. It was hard to convince her that a bed without walls is worth staying on. Oh dear. Luckily no matter how many times she got off the bed in the middle of the night, “But Krissy! Stacking cups is SO AWESOME THAT I SIMPLY CANNOT WAIT UNTIL MORNING!! DID YOU KNOW THERE ARE CUPS RIGHT HERE THIS IS THE COOLEST THING EVER!!!” Sigh. Ok baby, one more try. Let’s go to sleep.

Then she nuzzled into my armpit, put her thumb in her mouth and smiled her way to sleep. For 45 minutes until she woke up to repeat the whole process. Her brother just woke up to let me know he needs his mom then he ground his skull on mine and went right back to sleep. Every 30-ish minutes all night long. So the kids weren’t really alternating. I’d sometimes get two of him in between a week up from her. Oh dear.

But we got through and I was nice and loving. By the end of the visit the baby was willing to leave her daddy and come back to me because she likes me. Even though her daddy is her favorite person in the whole world. I feel pretty good about that.

I had mean thoughts a lot while they were here so I feel pretty bad about myself, of course. I was not nearly kind-enough in my head. But I’m pretty sure my hands and my voice were kind-enough all weekend.

Sometimes I feel jealous and hateful that everyone else deserves to have a childhood where people are kind and gentle with them but I did not deserve that. I can’t do anything to change what I received. But I can figure out that it was wrong and do something different.

Today I have to be at Fry’s at 8am when they open. I have to buy printer ink. Then I have to run home, print out Shanna’s permission form then take her to ALL DAY science camp. I’m kind of freaked out. I will miss her. I’m not sure how Calli and I will do without her this week.

Shanna is starting to ask about doing school stuff more formally and officially. She is having trouble sitting still and being patient in Hindi class and I told her that it is hard because she doesn’t practice sitting still and listening. It’s a skill like learning how to make your own pbj. She wants to start practicing so she can be better at it.

I feel like I am drowning in the things I “should” be doing. I should be writing books. I should be running. I should be practicing Hindi for 15-25 minutes every day. I should be practicing French 15-25 minutes every day. I should be practicing Spanish every day. I have to water plants every day. I have to figure out what to do about our bathroom because the water damage is getting egregious and my neighbor told me that once we get to this stage of this rot if we don’t handle it we will end up with major damage on the whole front of our house.

I should be saving more money. I should be…

I don’t feel good enough. I don’t feel smart enough. I don’t have enough energy to do all the things I should be doing and the things I have to do and the things I want to do. Drowning. Drowning. Drowning.

But today is another day. I have one kid for today. I “should” go work on the fence. I should …

Oh man. I’m tired. So tired I just want to crawl under a rock. At least I have AC.

I keep telling myself it will be easier to run in about three years when Calli can actually go out with me. Not even three years. Maybe a year and a half.

I have been avoiding running because all of the people I like to run with are much faster than me and I feel so ashamed of myself I just don’t want to run at all. I don’t want to be the reason they have to walk–because I am too pathetic to keep up. That means I should just avoid it as a hobby. Because I am bringing people down.

Even though I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open I read Shanna a chapter of Little House in the Big Woods when she asked before bed. I want to be available more than I want anything in the whole world.

Now I understand “fuck cancer”

For most of my life I have been kind of confused by the “fuck cancer” emphasis people have. They seem to be more upset by it than other kinds of death. I’m a death-is-death-how-doesn’t-matter person. Only in the past couple of weeks Kate Bornstein (who is one of the most important voices in gender deconstruction) has had a crowd source fundraising effort because she has cancer–we need her. She has the courage to speak about things that must be spoken about. She is really important.

And another person I know has 6, 4, and 2 year old children. Kate is very likely to survive. She has a very survivable kind of cancer and now the outpouring of love and money she will need to fight for life. His survival chances are in the single digits.

I can’t stop weeping. I “know” my grandmother died from cancer. I don’t know what kind–not breast cancer. I know that much.

The kind of knowing I want my children to have for me is something that cannot come until they are adults and putting it all together in retrospect. I think that I all of a sudden just received a catapulted stone of fear in my belly. How will his children know him?

He told me just before he found the lump that I had inspired him to start marathon training. That process was more or less how the lump started bothering him. That’s why they found this. I told him to start making videos for his kids. One for each birthday up until they are 25 or 30. They need to know you and get the advice you would give them.

Shanna was asking me about parents yesterday. Kind of the standard kid question kinds of things: do only Mommies take care of babies? Oh dear goodness I hope not or a lot of kids would starve to death. I told her that some babies have only one mommy or only one daddy and some babies have a mommy and a mommy (or mama) and some babies have two daddies and some babies have more than two parents of any possible gender consideration. What matters to a baby is that consistent grown ups hold and care for and love the baby. That is all that is needed to make a parent. Not biology. Not anything else. I said that babies are designed to fall in love with the grown ups who care for them because that is how the baby will ensure survival. Mutual love with a grown up means the grown up becomes invested and puts a lot of time and energy towards the baby.

She said, “So it doesn’t matter if it is a boy or a girl?” I asked her how many times it has mattered whether I have a penis or a vulva while I change diapers. I asked her if she thinks our female friend K is too stupid to figure out how to clean her son’s penis. Shanna laughed. I asked her if her father has ever had trouble wiping her butt. She confirmed that he is a poop wiping expert. I said, “Anuses are universal.”

She asked if girls are supposed to stay home with their babies. The timing on this conversation was just hilarious considering what I have been reading on the internet lately. I said girls are supposed to do the things that make them happy. By being happy in front of their kids they are teaching their kids the right way to live. For some mothers this means staying home and for some mothers this means working outside the home for a company. All mothers work. All mothers do a back breaking amount of work. If a mother has an outside job then the children can either stay with dad (I cited families we know) or if both parents work day care of some kind can be arranged (I explained several different examples we know).

Every family looks different because every family is made up of different people. Different people are made happy by different things. That is what makes life beautiful. If everyone was exactly the same life would be really crappy. Every person is on a completely individualized path through life.

I said that different people have different advantages. I talked to her about money. I talked to her about how some people have large extensive families and that is a different very important kind of support. It gives different life options. For example: single parenting is a very different experience if you are rich than if you are poor. Single parenting is a very different experience if you have a large and involved family than if you have no family support. I went on and on. She asked more questions. It kept going.

I tell my children frequently that while they are children they have a few specific jobs they have to work on. Their primary job is to play with the world. The process of play and exploration is the primary thing that children should be focused on. After that you have to learn how to have relationships with people; you have to learn how to be considerate. But the third thing is: with great privilege comes great responsibility. I tell my children explicitly that they are part of the most privileged cohort that has ever been born. They have more access to information and the ability to learn than any person has ever had at any point in history. And my kids have free access to it all day every day because they are not locked in an institutionalized setting following some bullshit agenda that is the resort of so much compromise nothing real is taught. I expect them to take learning seriously.

I talk about how the world is changing and there are a lot of people in the world who do not have access to information. There are a lot of big problems to be solved. People will have to be exceptionally able to synthesize large amounts of data in order to solve these problems. People will have to learn a bunch of cross-disciplines in order to solve these problems. The only way is to start young and take it seriously. Learn.

I tell my kids that I want them to grow up and be fierce and sure of their opinions. They should not believe they are “always right” because that is hubris–no one is always right. But listen to Davey Crockett: Be sure you’re right and go ahead. Plan at leisure; act with haste. If you hesitate then some someone less qualified will speak first and set the plan. That’s really not a great situation. If you can’t find a way; make a way. You will make mistakes or you will never learn and grow. You must make big mistakes. That is part of life.

Even if I get upset with you over a mistake I will get over it. I love you more than I love breathing. More than I love any thing in the whole world. I will get angry with you. I will shout at you. I will never hit you. I will always love you.

Thinking about cancer makes me feel so very afraid of my children not knowing me. Shanna proudly informed me that she was going to grow up and be a bad ass just like me. I laughed. I told her that would make me very happy. I want to see that. I want to see what she is going to be like. I want to know her. I want that so fucking much.

Getting to see what Shanna will do in the world will be my entertainment and reward for still being alive.

And that’s before I even get to Calli. Calli is a born engineer. She is going to need to have a woman behind her saying, “You can do it” for a great many steps in her life. She is going to live in a “man’s world”. Hell she already wants to be Diego–not Dora. Not Alicia. She’s Diego. She’s the god damn main character who rescues everyone.

They need me. It is so clear. Like my friend’s children need him. And I start weeping again and I understand fuck cancer.

There is no right. There is no should. There is no deserve in this life. There just is.

On April 1st it will be the birthday of one of the awesomest women I know. I’m sorry I won’t be in Portland with her. That would have been wonderful.

In other news I am exchanging books with a friend who is also a writer on April 1st. We are essentially work-shopping one another’s books. You know, a real forking editing job. I’m ridiculously excited. I want No Secrets to be finished and I have stalled. It has been almost a year and a half since I wrote it and it still isn’t in paper. Erf.

In September Noah is officially off the leash and he gets to start being a mostly absentee father/husband while he works on whatever he wants to work on. I’m thinking about treating July like my own personal NaNoWriMo. I want to write Outrunning Suicide before I have a hard time negotiating for time. A lot of the shape of it is working itself out in my head. Stylistically it will not resemble No Secrets. That’s for the best. I’ve been reading reviews of writers differently lately. “What will they bitch about with my content–repetitiveness. I can’t just tell the same stories. Hm. Interesting.”

Sometimes it is kind of convenient that I have been through such a ridiculous variety of kinds of extreme trauma. I always have another fucking story. Ha.

A few times lately I have thought about my mother. I’ve thought about what will happen when Shanna is eighteen. Shanna might want to meet my family. She will be allowed to. I’ll drive her to the house and wait at the bottom of the hill for her. She doesn’t have to share my views on them. She didn’t make my bed; I did.

Shanna asked me if I loved my mommy when I was a little girl. I told her that when I was a little girl I thought my mommy was the best thing in the whole universe. I loved her with my whole heart. She was my sun and my moon. Shanna then pointed out that I don’t feel that way now. I said, “No. I don’t. You will have different opinions when you are in your thirties than you have right now too.” She looked thoughtful.

It is really hard giving space for beliefs that are not your own. If I break the incest chain in my family I have absolutely done a measurable good in the world. I just found a biography from someone in the middle of a six generation chain. My stomach hurts too much to read it right now. At some point in the not-too-distant future I will have read everything easily findable on this topic. That’s a little weird to know. It makes me want to create more data.

Life goals:

I want to deepen and broaden the scope of information known about incestuous families. At some point I will figure out a measurable goal around this topic. I don’t have it yet.

I want to live outside my country of origin for a minimum of five years, preferably in one year chunks. I’ll get homesick bad.

I want to see what Noah can do. He has really impressed me so far. I want to see what he and I can do together.

You outrun suicide by giving yourself full permission to do it, but you keep moving the goal posts. “Ok I can do it. But first I have to do…” It’s on the to do list. But a lot of other things are going to happen first.

I want my children to be adults and to be able to say, “Yeah. I agree. It’s time. I love you. Do what is right for you.” Maybe I will have to move to Oregon once I hit 70. When I get there I will get to be near a friend of mine. She is partnered with one of the people who pushed that law through. I feel so grateful that I get to know people who change the world. They give me the courage to keep trying.

Holy fuck. I just had a thought. What age level is Outrunning Suicide aimed at? If I want a lot of people to be able to read it I have to think about that. My writing is rather obtuse most of the time. Well that will take some thought.

When I was a child there were very few periods of time when I didn’t want to die. I stayed alive mostly because I was too depressed to be expeditious. I didn’t know anything other than pain. I was not permitted to act like I was in pain. That was rude.

My life is different now. I didn’t understand what a life free from pain was. It was a myth. I wouldn’t say that I am exactly pain free at this point but I am probably at the lowest level of pain and the highest level of joy I have ever had. These are the best days of my life. And I know it while I am living them.

I keep wandering in my head to a Madeleine L’Engle book A Wind in the Door. The mitochondria are in trouble! The farandolae aren’t deepening! I just read Collapse by Jared Diamond. Help! The planet is in trouble! The humans aren’t deepening!

I don’t know. Lots of feelings. Today I don’t want to die. And I weep at the loss of a great mind. I hope he doesn’t read this. My grief is not his problem. I’m glad his wife has a very supportive family. I’m glad they live near her family and not his. I am so sorry it is happening.

I’ve read tragedies for years. I’ve taught units on tragedy. I never really got it before. I’ve never been deep enough into a community to really understand what the loss of a person means before.

He’s going to fight. He’s that kind of guy. My grief is entirely premature and I need to stfu. But this is where I feel.

I have spent most of my life believing very firmly that for me cancer was one of the goalposts. I wouldn’t fight. I would go quietly into the dark night because I’m not interested in more suffering.

Life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

Now I don’t know. When I think about the things I want to do. When I think about not seeing my daughters grow up to be fierce and bad ass? (She-Ra is pretty bad ass is a frequent comment around our house. I said it once. Oy.)

There is no right. There is no should. There is no deserve. There is only what is. And what you go do with it. We live in a time of practically preternatural access to science. If you have money. If you want to fight something bad enough we live in a time of honest-to-goodness miracles.

How much do I want to see my daughters at thirty? Forty? Fifty? Sixty? What will they do with their lives? I want to know so very badly. I am curious. I want to know. I want to see what this being I have unleashed on the world will do.

Somehow I don’t envision her walking onto the family compound at eighteen and not coming back. It’s thirteen years away. She’ll be able to evaluate people on her own at that point. She will have had a lot of practice with a lot of different kinds of people. She will be able to read people well. My family isn’t subtle. Even if she does want to get to know them–and why not, they are interesting people–she won’t want to stay.

She will have shit to do. My family has nothing to do but be unhappy. They will sit in one place doing that until they die. I don’t understand why. It’s like a clock that has run down. Poverty, physical health, mental health, and a kind of apathy I don’t understand. An anger about entitlement and responsibility I don’t understand.

I have had such a ridiculous amount of privilege. I’m only starting to understand the shape of it.

I have had the privilege of being able to set the goal post of “I’ll kill myself if” pretty low but I’ve been healthy enough to always meet a really ableist centric attitude. I have been able to be an asshole about independence. I’ve also had a guaranteed income for most of my adult life. I’ve been financially stable without having to have a job. That’s so fucking ridiculous.

I have no safety net though. I don’t have Bank of Mom and Dad. I don’t have emergency reserves beyond those I create. For most of my adult life I was inches above the poverty line living in one of the most expensive places in the world. I have never come close to bankruptcy and my credit score is ridiculous. I did that with a lot of seed capitol. I feel like an asshole for being glad that pit bull attacked me. It made the whole rest of my life better.

Perspective if everything.

I’ve been thinking about my mom. I have been specifically thinking, “I forgive you. I hope you forgive me.” If my kids ever go and meet her I hope my mom understands why I kept them away. My kids will be different. They will not have broken spirits. I hope she will be able to see that and be glad. I hope she will forgive me. I hope she understands wanting to keep your kids safe.

I hope she will forgive me.

I hope she will still be alive so that she will be able to meet my kids some day. I hope my kids want to talk to her a lot for a while. I bet she won’t live long after that but she will die happier than she has been in a long time. They will be like her. They will be able to ask her questions about things she has had great skill at doing. They will think she is an interesting person.

It’s kind of a weird balance. I have to tell the truth to my children. The truth is that no one is all bad. Everyone has good parts. The thing about life is learning how to find the good that balances the bad and evaluating if the value is high enough. In most families people decide that the kin alliance is worth putting up with the bad. That’s normal and right.

When my kids are adults they will not be children who are easy to mold. They will not be instructed in how sex is natural and fine between family members as long as you don’t breed because it is only in breeding too close to the line that you develop problems.

I hope that when my daughters are eighteen they will have the ovaries to say to a biological family member who solicits sexual contact, “You are a disgusting piece of shit and I hope you rot in hell.” Because yeah. That’s the reaction you should have to incest.

But I don’t think my family would dare at that point. And if everyone keeps their britches on, it’s fine… right? Oh fuck. *beat head on wall* Wait. I’m not supposed to do that any more.

Maybe I should get dressed and run. That would be all healthful and crap.

I want to live. I have stuff to do. I’m scared. Fuck cancer. I can’t be strong enough to outrun it. No one can. It just happens. Am I going to instantly stop smoking so I can lessen my risk of lung cancer? No. I wouldn’t be a nice person. (Vaporizer is still impact on the lungs. My lungs will tell you.)

On the way I will eat more Easter candy. My body says: “Hey, I know-instead of crying: sugar rush and endorphins!” Is this ideal? Nope. We recognize two candy-holidays a year in this house. Otherwise I would get in a long of trouble. I didn’t eat candy like this when I was a kid. It’s kind of weird.

Ok, run.

Suicidal ideation

I love getting eight hours of sleep by 3am. It makes my whole day better. It makes my whole life better. Then I am more cheerful and enthusiastic about what I have to do. I consider it the first thing I must do in a day in order to have a good day. The second thing I must do in order to have a good day is get more than 75% of my chores done by 9am. I have a thing in my head.

I participate in a variety of online support groups–or rather I have over the years, not so much at this second–and it has been a fairly big thing for me over the past ten years “I am more productive by 9am than a great many people are all day.” It’s a thing in my head. I work very hard on it. That way I feel I have the freedom to do with the rest of the day as I please.

Pretty much every online support group has strict rules about talking about suicide. Really, pretty much everyone everywhere believes it isn’t ok to talk about–especially if you are seriously thinking about it.

My furnace dries out the air terribly. I’ve spent all winter coughing and hacking and feeling unhappy about it since I moved into this house. Now my kids join me. So they’ve been waking up a lot at night. It means I have a lot of time in the middle of the night to think about them and to think about suicide and for me to think about what happiness means.

There are a lot of parenting books on the market that will tell you that you are bad bad doomed if you have children because you want to give yourself a reason to live. BAD. DON’T DO THAT! That’s what the books say.

To that I say: becoming a parent is always a selfish decision. Why is my selfish decision worse than yours? I have promised myself and my kids that I will absolutely not kill myself until they are adults because they require care and I am the one who has to give it. I have to say that it gets easier by the year. I’m learning what happiness feels like.

I know a lot of people who work very hard to ensure that they don’t have to “deal with” their kids in the middle of the night. Gosh that is my favorite time. I love feeling like my mere presence keeps the monsters at bay. Because I do. In Calli’s mind and in Shanna’s mind if I am in the room then they are safe and life is good. That’s just the end of the debate.

That feeling is better than every drug I have ever taken and I’ve tried a really lot of drugs. A lot. A really lot. Ha. But I did the vast majority of my drug taking (other than this stoner thing)  in under two years after I was a college graduate. Let me get on my pulpit for a second to lecture anyone younger than me about how you should wait until your brain is done forming before you use drugs. Wait until your brain decides which connections it wants before you break sections. Just do. I’m serious. You have a long fucking life in front of you. You don’t need to try everything in the first twenty years. Good grief.

I have never believed that I had a long life ahead of me. I have wanted to die since I was seven years old. For the past twenty-four years I have wanted to be dead more than I have wanted to be alive. Well, I would say that the percentages kind of rock back and forth staying in the 40’s and 50’s. I wanted to die a lot and I didn’t want to live very much but actually killing yourself is harder than it looks sometimes. I did not overdose as a teenager as a cry for help. I simply vomited up the drugs and was found before I could finish dying. Different.

Now I’m really glad I’m not dead. I feel like getting to sleep with my little girls, with their faces pressed to mine as they mumble over and over while falling asleep, “Mommy love you so much. So much. Sooooooooo much” this is the reason that people live. This feeling of love and happiness. This is why people stay alive. The hope of this. The belief that some day they will get to have this feeling. This is the increased joy that parents have that non-parents don’t get. That is one of those things they find in studies. Over a lifetime parents have more joy than non-parents–a shitload more stress too… but it’s worth it.

I never thought I would actually experience having someone love me like this. I believed this would always be for someone else. I’m very concerned that I not alienate my children… ever. I have to behave appropriately in order to deserve a relationship with them. But I’m not very good at acting appropriately.

Sometimes I feel like the biggest fucking hypocrite in the world when I get mad at my kids for breaking rules. Ha.

I told Shanna, about the stealing candy thing, it is my job to teach you the rules of society. I get angry because I feel afraid. If you steal as an adult there are serious consequences. I have to teach you that it is not a good thing to steal or the rest of your life will be harder and you will have a lot of very unpleasant experiences. I don’t want you to suffer. How can we work on you not doing this? I told her that I really don’t know “how this should be taught” because when I was a child the way I was taught was to be hit. I don’t want to hit her and I’m not really sure what the other options are and I feel kind of overwhelmed sometimes as I try to deal with it. I’m sorry I scream so much. I know it is annoying or scary depending on the day.

I asked her if she knew that how much I love her is completely unaffected by whether or not she perfectly follows the rules. I do not perfectly follow the rules and I hope she will always love me. She told me that somewhere else there are kids who always do exactly what their mothers say and they never break rules. I laughed and said those must be the most boring, uncurious children on the planet and how sad for their mothers’. She looked very confused.

I have not thought about killing myself in a bit. Certainly weeks. But I was asked to reaffirm that I understand and will follow the rules of forums and I WILL NEVER POST THAT I AM FEELING SUICIDAL. Thus I am thinking about the concept though I am not experiencing it. I have felt shamed and bad for being suicidal for pretty much my entire life. I’m aware that people are uncomfortable with the fact that I feel this way and their discomfort is the most important thing here.

Talking about it, or not, has not even slightly increased my self-harming behaviors. Over time my self-harming behaviors have kind of melted away. I’m not hurting myself anymore, I’m really not. It was a process I had to go through. I had to be whiny and angsty and I had to really process how much I wanted to die. This process is simply part of being alive for me. I understand that other people don’t like it. I feel very uncomfortable about being told over and over and over and over that because I make other people feel uncomfortable when I talk about it I shouldn’t talk about it.

Well, how much do you enjoy being surprised by someone offing themself? Wouldn’t you have preferred a warning? Dude, seriously.

P!nk has a song on her new album about drinking and doing drugs and running away and I feel suicide is strongly implied. I really appreciate it when people admit in public that this struggle is part of their life. The song is The Great Escape and I listen to it a lot right now. I’ve been thinking about how I understand this whole “creation of something new” thing now that I didn’t understand before. I have a family now. I have never had one before. Oh wow. This is how they are supposed to look? I’ve been thinking about having something to live for.

It’s really interesting watching how the percentages change. Feeling suicidal vs. wanting to live. That’s a ratio I’ve been actively tracking for most of my life. I have visualized it a lot of different ways over time. These days I think wanting to die falls into the teens. I’m very happy about that. That’s a ridiculous amount of progress for me.

But I’m not supposed to talk about it. I’m not supposed to be graphic about my ongoing struggles to not kill myself. Someone else might feel uncomfortable. Welcome to my sandbox, motherfucker. Here the rules are that I get to talk about whatever gets me through the night. If I am sitting here and writing something then I am not cutting. I am not hitting my body against a large blunt object. I am not soliciting some piece of shit to hurt me. I am not offering up sex to people I don’t know just to get through the night without having to be alone.

I’m not alone. I really love that my kids need me in the middle of the night because I need them in the middle of the night. I need to feel love in the middle of the night. I need to feel wanted. I need to feel like it matters that I not die.

The passion and the pain are going to keep you alive someday. I honestly don’t know how someone in my position would work through this without children. I can understand putting off the decision to die because you still have things you want to do–that is more or less the path I was on pre-kids. I made deals with myself, “I want to do ____. ____. and ____ then it doesn’t matter.” I was very selfish and random about the deals over the years and that’s ok. It was a deal with me about how much pain I have to endure.

That’s the plain and simple reality behind my suicidal ideation. Do I or don’t I get to decide how much pain I have to be in? Am I or am I not in charge of this decision? I think this is where I make the jump to atheism entirely.

I want to be the one who decides when my pain ends. I hold that right. I consider it one of my basic rights. Other animals do the same thing. It is natural just like infanticide is natural. It exists in every species. In America there are approximately thirty seven children killed by their parents every week. You don’t see headlines very often. Every fucking week.

Parenting is hard but I fucking guarantee you that no part of this journey has been remotely as difficult as what came before it so I’m still coasting. My second labor was nine days long followed by a blood hemorrhage that left me unable to walk to the bathroom for weeks. I crawled. Otherwise I simply did not leave my bed. But my friend K delivered enough food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for three weeks. It was a calm but peaceful period. I learned my baby. I didn’t mind the work. It was nice.

Life is about work. Life is about creating and the things you want to do. I freakin love Richard Scarry. Everyone is a worker. All the work must be done. Some of the work is not more honorable than anything else. There is a hierarchy in pay–that tends to exist because some jobs can be done by many people and some jobs can be done by smaller and smaller groups of people and when you have to compete for the talents of a small group… you have to pay a lot of money.

You have to think about those people. The ones who are so selfish. Wait… that’s my husband. He has spent our entire marriage working his ass off to increase his income. Isn’t that selfish? He didn’t do it until he had a reason to. He didn’t care enough to bother. He wasn’t driven by love of acquisition on its own. But now he has this wife with really expensive travel interests and uhm he has decided that he wants to provide for me. He knew that was who I wanted to be before we married.

He doesn’t want me to spend time wanting to die. He wants me to have a list of things I want to do that is really long and complex and it’s ok if it is also expensive–he knows I am overall frugal and I am providing for our long-term safety before I take travel money out. It’s cool. He told me so. Explicitly. He reminds me every few months. It’s weird but really cool. I appreciate how explicitly my husband wants me to be happy.

He wants to keep me. He thinks that the likelihood is higher if I have a sandbox where I can say whatever I want and not get kicked off a support forum for it. He gives me resources I don’t have to have in my head.

I feel like both of us really changed when we got married. We have someone to work for and that is a powerful motivator for both of us. It has been interesting to see as a progression. We get better and better at not hurting one another as we make mistakes and learn how to talk about them. We really don’t keep making the same mistakes over and over.  We make new ones! heh

So, to continue on the P!nk trend: Slut Like You is fun. When you are looking to ensure that you don’t have to be alone tonight it dramatically changes how you act. The stakes are different. You’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow. You have to get through tonight in order to get there.

I’m trying to figure out what mental hurdle I have to working on the books right now. I know I’m overwhelmed by life. I think that I’m just too tired to think. I need to have some reason for a deadline so I can plan around it. I’ll figure it out. I need to decide how much I want to have done by December so I can backwards plan.

I need to feel like I am moving towards what I want to be moving towards. Right now I feel pretty out of control of my schedule. I’m not sure how to change that. Well no. That’s a big fat lie. I know how to change it. I am changing it. This is a process. The schedule will be back to being shaped how I need it to be shaped in about another two weeks. Then we leave town for a week. See how this goes? Oh man.

Portland, we are practically doing a drive-by. March 25th we drive north towards Eugene. We are sleeping there because the kids will be sick of the car. We are aiming to arrive at Dad’s house at 6pm on Tuesday the 26th. We are spending the day with Aunt Cookie, a truly delightful woman. I have an intense interest in hearing stories about Noah’s family. They shape my story now. I don’t have many sources of information.

Wednesday during the day we don’t have plans and we will probably want to go do something fun. Not sure what yet. Wednesday we should hang out with Dad. Thursday and Friday we are hanging out with A. Ha. I haven’t even emailed her to confirm that yet. But she offered it to me. I’m taking it. (pause. email sent.) We will spend Thursday and Friday nights walking around Dad’s neighborhood talking to him and playing with kids. On Saturday we drive allllllll the way home. With four kids who have had a long week and who will not be happy about being in the car. Thank goodness for iPads. Ha.

What we ask of our children is not natural. How we have to deal with the constraints of their lives is not natural. But beating them isn’t a better option. Sometimes you can’t let them have the pace of travel that is appropriate for them. You have to just get there. It is hard but life is that way sometimes.

Once upon a time travel involved physical exertion… even sitting in a wagon is fairly labor intensive compared to a car. We provide these children padded worlds of strapped in boredom. I am not capable of being entertaining for a twelve hour drive. Not even in shifts because then my “off” shift would be driving and I would have a stroke from road rage. That is not in anyone’s best interests. No, my kids can’t entertain themselves for that long. I understand that this is a tragic failing. Never the less… we are going to use them. They can’t use them for the whole trip so there will be other entertainment involved. It’ll work out. It will be one long day of our lives. No big deal. I’m trying to psych myself up for the trip. I’m trying to lay out in advance how much energy I am going to need for various stages. I’m trying to figure out how I will do it without getting punchy about having to teach my kids new situational manners over and over and over for a week solid. It’s a pain but worth it in the long run.

I need my kids to understand how to evaluate for situational manners. I need to consciously talk about how I am evaluating everything around me for clues about how I should behave. I do this every time we travel. It’s a lot easier at Disneyland because there are a lot of “let loose” places. We are going to be moving between environments that will have wildly different “grown up” rules that are going to feel unfair or inappropriately constricting because they aren’t used to those rules. I’m going to be tested over and over. It’s going to be fun.

But this is the whole process of life. I want to teach them how to do this while smiling. I want this trip to be a happy and joyful memory. Shanna is probably going to actually remember this trip for a long time. We will take pictures. She may eventually remember the pictures more than the day but she will have the same kind of connection to these people that I have to Brittney, the little girl who was born four months before me across the street from my family. I was set in my baby carrier next to her in her baby carrier. I have pictures of us when we are two and three and four and seven and and…

I want my kids to have that. I hope they never lose it.

I didn’t think I would lose Brittney. It is hard finding out how unforgivable existing is. Oh, that’s not true I would be told. I am allowed to exist. But I must be silent so no one ever has to actually find out the specifics because oh man that is over the line. The book. The fucking book. I’m having trouble going back through and editing. This is why I paid an editor. Unfortunately after reading the Kindle edition I am entirely unsatisfied with the job she did and I feel fairly back at square one. I thought I was getting an editor but what I got was a copyeditor and that’s a different job.

I wanted technical editing. I wanted someone to give me feedback on flow and let me know where I am being vague and random. I wanted someone to look at it as a work of art to be made better with a few tweaks. Ahhhhh. I get it now. I did get that. That’s what I asked for. She didn’t make many suggestions for changes. She treated it like it was sacrosanct as a poor incest victims story. It was allowed to ramble and be weird.

Ack. But then people don’t want to buy it and it isn’t actually telling the story I want to tell. I can’t always see when I’m doing that without this ridiculous analytical reading that is really hard to do. A page takes me multiple hours. Actually reading something and dealing with the errors is god damn fucking hard work. Why do you think the overall production values of everything in the everything has gone down? (And why I make no promises about my blog entries. These are not polished pieces, yo.)

But the book was supposed to be. And it so clearly isn’t. I feel kind of morally offended by that. In order to motivate that kind of interest you either need a True Fan or someone who is going to make money off the writing. I had neither. Such is life. I’m slowly progressing on editing. It’s hard. I need to set specific goals and plow through it though. Bleh. Yuck. Bleh.

I am running. I’m tired and I’m switching my days for workouts around like crazy but I’m getting through everything. I have a 10k at the end of April. So far my standard for 5ks has been “I pray for under forty minutes”. I’m hoping to do the 10k in eighty minutes.

That means maintaining a standard pace just barely faster than 1km in eight minutes. That means .62 miles in eight minutes. That means I’ll have to run at least 11:50 through the whole damn race. That is way way way faster than I did the marathon. (My marathon average was 15:40/mile. I’m serious when I say I walked a marathon. I’m still hella proud.)

This pace is going to be a huge stretch for me. My race partner may have a different set of goals and staying together is more important than time to me. Additionally: I’m all for wimping out at mile five and crawling the last mile if I feel bad. Flexibility.

What is the goal: the method or the result? Let’s be clear that when it comes to crossing six miles of distance speed vs. just reaching the finish line is a very different set of goals. I no longer fear not reaching the finish line physically… unless I push myself too hard. I am not in amazing physical shape. I’m in good shape. But I’m not an experienced athlete. I have ramped up at a pretty reasonable rate all things considered.

Every body is where it is. You can’t be too hard-lined about “goals” because progress not perfection kind of trumps any stuck on points. It is quite possible I’m not physically capable of running that fast for that long… yet. I may have to work longer before I reach that goal. I sure as fuck would not have been able to do the marathon at that pace. Not given the conditions (high eighties in temperature, high eighties in humidity, really terrible air quality, I started my period at mile thirteen along with horrible cramps). I just couldn’t expect different from myself that day.

I have to still be alive tomorrow to try again. I have to make it to today. If the pace is more important than anything else I might injure myself and then there won’t ever be another try no matter what. And maybe the rest of my life will be a lot harder. Because I was stupid and careless because I don’t care very much if I continue to stay alive.

I really can’t do that any more. Not if I want to be here for more nights of “I love you soooo much”. I want that more than I want anything else. So I will learn how to be good to my body. So I can have as many of those nights as I can.

The passion and the pain are going to keep you alive some day.

I should probably go start breakfast.

No one ever knows the long-term value of what they do. That knowledge is given to no creature. If I want to be a character that has existed then there must be record of that. Only I care to create that record. Noah is invested in supporting this branch of growth on his family tree. He sees it as vital to his long-term success. I’m not sure how I snow balled him.

I think that talking about suicide is something I need to be able to do. My grandmother killed herself. She overdosed. She had been trying for decades. My mother has stories of cleaning up blood after she got home from school because her mother was cutting her wrists again. My brother killed himself. He left the residential care facility where he lived because he had a severe brain injury and would never be able to care for himself again. He walked to a gas station and bought a can of gasoline. He went behind a local grocery store and lit himself on fire. My father sat in the garage with the motor running.

Have I mentioned that I have turned my garage into a really nice room? Ok, technically I have done nothing permanent because city ordinance says it must be able to hold a car at all times and my response would be “give me three minutes and a person to help me move furniture”. That’s not a permanent room. But it’s a really nice place to hang out. There are not likely to be cars in here.

Harm Reduction means being honest about the patterns of behavior in your life. It means setting specific goals and working to reduce the harm you are inflicting on yourself. Usually you are inflicting the harm (hair pulling, cutting, biting your nails, drinking alcohol, picking at scabs, doing most recreational drugs including pot, any obsessive repetitive damage to your body really) because you are trying to relieve stress from some other place in your life.

Noah said he read an article claiming that the first person likely to live over a thousand years is probably alive today. Think about mortality. It’s changing. The brackets are shifting. Where do I want to be on that scale? I don’t want to live a thousand years. That sounds like work. I would rather just live. But I have a rather lot of decades of work in front of me.

What am I going to do when I grow up? I will probably experience an unprecedented to my species amount of freedom after my children are adults. I will still be married to this guy who thinks I am the best thing since sliced bread. I know the deall: there is some travel he wants to do and otherwise I have to do it alone and not be gone too long or too often. Too long is going to be tested a lot over the years as we figure out what that means.

Statistically speaking I am extremely likely to die by my own choice. Sometimes just sitting with that in the pit of my stomach is very hard. You know what they say about statistics? There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

I believe in self-fulfilling prophesies. I believe the only thing that ever can or has changed the world is someone deciding they want to do it. Yes, of course coalitions are awesome and all… but it takes individuals having a specific vision. A dream, if you will. Otherwise there is no call to exit one’s torpor and do anything. If you are not living up to your vision of yourself… what are you doing instead? Why is there a discrepancy? Are you realistically going to change your life?

Then either change or decide to be happy, right? Happiness isn’t about getting what you want it’s about enjoying what you have. I think I saw that on Pinterest recently.

I want security. I want to have roots. I want a place to come back to. I want community. I want to be allowed to exist without carefully following the rules about what I am or am not allowed to talk about. I like fully informed opt-in relationships.

Now I’m just procrastinating. It was nice to write. I haven’t spent this much time on it in a while. Sometimes it is funny to me the way that writing is one of the most purely satisfying activities I do. I have thought. There. Evidence. Ha. Take that Universe. I have taken up space. In a technological world I have taken up a space smaller than a pin head. Whoop.

But we never know what our impact will be. We have to just exist. And get out of our houses. That’s important whether you like it or not. To be honest I don’t like it very much but I try hard not to take my dislike out on the people who are randomly unlucky and happen to be standing next to me. It isn’t dislike of the people. It is dislike of being out of my house.

It took me a long time to understand that and really fully feel it. I enjoy my work here. I enjoy feeling like I am doing things to work towards my long-term happiness. I am enjoying the physical work and when I am older and less able to work hard I will get to sit in my garden in the shade and enjoy a lifetime of work. Hopefully while babysitting for grandkids who will visit a lot so that I get to know other children deeply.

Now I get it. Now a lot more things make sense to me.

But I have other things I need to do first. Like breakfast. Ugh.

Bucket list: Run a marathon

 For many years I have said, “Some day I will run a marathon.” I’m aware that a lot of people say that. My ex-boyfriend said it all the time. He still hasn’t. I suppose the idea came into my head because my brother Jimmy is a runner. I asked him in February of 2011 to commit to doing a marathon with me. It was a tentative step towards developing a relationship. We have never been close. Kids in families like ours aren’t allowed to be close.
In May of 2011 my Uncle Bob died. Uncle Bob was the man in my childhood who loved me and cared for me without sexually assaulting me. My family didn’t tell me he was in the hospital or that they were taking him off of life support. My niece decided I should know and she called me. He died while I was stuck in traffic less than five miles away from the hospital.
Something inside me broke. My sister asked me if I had “ever lost someone close to me before” and turned red with fury when I responded, “like our father or our brother Tommy?” I wasn’t allowed to bring them up. They “didn’t count” because they both abused me and sexually assaulted me. I went home and outed myself as an incest survivor on the internet. My brother Jimmy didn’t think that was ok. He told me I was melodramatic and looking for attention. I haven’t spoken to him since. Since my family all decided they were done with me I figured it was a good time to finally write the story of my childhood. I did so in November of 2011.
In January of 2012 I asked my housemate/co-parent to move out, which was stressful and emotionally hard. I also started running. I decided that even though I wouldn’t actually be doing it with Jimmy I was going to do the marathon anyway. We were planning on Long Beach because it is one of the flattest marathons in the state. I registered. I looked up training plans and put them on my Google Calendar for the next ten months.
When you decide to do something there is this waiting period. You want to do it and it is going to be ridiculously hard—how do you get there? I’ve never done anything physically taxing like this before. The only running I previously had done was getting away from people who wanted to beat the shit out of me. I did one year of t-ball and less than a full season of little league. I was “catcher” for one pitch. I missed and it hit me in the stomach and made me puke and cry. They stuck me in the outfield and I got sick of going after a couple of weeks. So I had no basis of “fitness” to build on.
It’s probably worth mentioning that I am a stay at home mom with two kids. They are two and four. So I’ve been doing this running while trying to manage them. Finding time has been interesting. For the first five months I ran in the afternoons after my husband got off work because none of my runs took very long. Once the runs started getting longer and longer I switched to leaving my house by six in the morning. I have no childcare. I have to make use of what little time my husband has available. He is a software engineer so he is out of the house a minimum of 45 hours a week and often more than that. And he wrote a book this year so he doesn’t have a lot of time available for helping me. It’s been stressful.
I hear a lot of people talk about how running is supposed to improve a persons mood. I have no idea who these people are but it doesn’t bloody work for me. I have spent the year crying. I cry before I run. I cry while I run. I cry when I get home. I have a lot of grief. I’m crying for Uncle Bob. I’m crying for my father. I’m crying for my mother. I’m crying for my sister and my brothers. I’m crying for my niece and nephews. I cry and feel worthless and empty. It doesn’t matter how I feel on any given day. I know what I have to do. I schedule things so I don’t have to wonder what a day will require.
I have asked myself over and over all year why this is important to me. Why am I torturing myself? Am I running because my brother is a runner? Because I want to prove that I am a fucking Archer whether my family wants to acknowledge that I am alive or not? Because I want to be a bad ass? Because… I don’t even know. I said I would do it. If I quit or stop then I become just one more person who makes promises and doesn’t keep them. I said I would run the Long Beach Marathon.
About a month before the event a good friend ran a twenty mile race near her home in Portland, Oregon. I was kidding when I said, “Hey if you trained up to this mileage then a full marathon is easy. Come do it with me!” Surprisingly she said yes. Within hours she had talked to her husband and booked a flight.
The last month of training was both the hardest and the easiest. All of a sudden I wasn’t on this terrible solo death march of feeling abandoned. I had to keep training because Ali was coming. Ali loves me. I still had a lot of days where I cried so hard my knees buckled and I fell to the ground and cried until I couldn’t cry any more. Then I got up and ran again. The good days came more often.
Six days before the race I drove to Southern California with my family. We were off to Disneyland! The girls and I had a lot of fun getting in my last walking miles in the park. The day before the race Ali was supposed to fly down first thing in the morning. Her flight was delayed. At the first notice I started feeling a little worried but I thought she would make it and it would be fine.
Six hours later they cancelled her flight entirely. I was afraid that was the end. I didn’t sob on the phone to Ali. I only freaked out a little in text. Her amazing husband jumped on the internet and booked her another flight. It was later and going into a different airport and it would be a lot more complicated—but she would get to SoCal. Unfortunately she would get there too late to pick up her race bib. She emailed me a picture of her ID and her husband emailed me a waver to print so I could pick up her bib for her. We live in the future!
I drove down to the Expo by myself. I didn’t want to be focused on my kids while I was trying to figure out where to go. I wasn’t feeling patient. I checked the lists of people registered. My brother’s name wasn’t on it. After a year of heart pounding anxiety worrying about seeing him that was rather anticlimactic if you ask me.
So I picked up the bibs and went back to our hotel room. I angsted and fussed. Ali got to her moms-in-law’s house. I arrived around 7:30. We talked more than we should have. It would have been impossible to avoid. I hardly ever get to see her. Talking to her feels really good. So we didn’t get to sleep till around 11 pm. I slept till 2:30 am. Then I woke up to use the bathroom and the crying started. I cried until Ali woke up around 5:30. I cried because I didn’t have one more chance to see anyone in my family. They are just done with me. I think there was some big part of me that was praying that Jimmy would see me and hug me. I haven’t said that out loud all year. I was afraid to hope. I was smart.
We woke up and piddled around getting ready. Ali had trouble forcing her way through her breakfast so we left about fifteen minutes after we were supposed to. That’s ok, we left a little bit of a buffer. Then it turned out that the person driving the vehicle had a different opinion about the optimal way to get to the race grounds. An opinion that was unfortunately not born out in reality. We were blocked continually by the race track. Whoops. Eventually we went around on the freeway (what Ali was campaigning hard for from the beginning, apparently—I was fairly unaware of this subtext) and arrived at the race. We had just enough time to stop at the port-a-potties before the last wave started. We hurried. We made it into the last wave and settled in for our run.
I’d like to say it was wonderful because I was with Ali and in many ways it was. She sang me silly songs. She encouraged and coaxed. She helped me through the rough parts. There were a lot of rough parts. The first big problem was the air quality. I am not used to SoCal air quality. I felt like I had to chew each breath before swallowing. It was really hard to run. I was dizzy and nauseated. We walked a lot. It was also almost twenty degrees hotter than either of us are used to running in. Oh and the humidity. The humidity was nightmarish (thus the bad air quality). We were wet all day and crusted in salt. But the real kicker? I started my period at mile 13 along with terrible cramps that made me want to go to bed and curl up and cry. Luckily Ali had extra tampons. Yay for planning ahead. A medical station provided some ibuprofen. I had to finish.
It was beautiful traveling along the ocean. The city of Long Beach is certainly picturesque. One of the most disheartening moments of the race was when the half marathoners split off and we went from being part of a large crowd to being one of the stragglers. It was a little sad for me to realize how far behind the pack of “runners” we were for the marathon. Really we mostly walked. I ran as much as I could but I didn’t want to faint or puke so it wasn’t that much.
In the end our running time was 6:47. We finished seven and a half minutes before they closed the finish line. We were part of the last wave and they only keep the finish line open for 7:30 hours. It’s a darn good thing we weren’t just a hair later and that I managed to run as much as I did.
I did it. I finished the Long Beach Marathon. Thank you Ali. Near as I can tell this is the hardest thing I have ever done with another person. I’m so glad I had you. I won’t forget.
The flea had a gleam in his eye. (Silly song Ali sang.) I think it was because he was plotting. He was wondering how hard it was going to be to run. He wanted to know if he could keep up with you too.
I won’t do another marathon with you. Can we do a half next time? That’s only half as crazy. Next time on your turf with better air quality.

 PS- Sharing is caring.

You’re never fully dressed without a smile.

Noah is awake but playing a video game so I should probably shut up. But he’s so good to talk to… Really we should be sleeping. It is 3:26am. Oh well.

When I’m out running I write these eloquent blog posts in my head. Then I get home and sit in front of the computer and think, “hunh my wrists are tingling. Maybe another day.”

It’s weird to me the ways things intersect. I keep seeing people bringing up the whole “Don’t tell women to smile at you” thing on the internet. I don’t appreciate it when random people tell me to smile like I don’t appreciate random people telling me anything. But I put a lot of energy into trying to smile at people. It almost feels like I shouldn’t.

I feel like a bad feminist pretty much all the time. I very consciously try to smile at people and cheerfully say, “Hello” when I pass them. I’m fairly religious about this when I run. Seriously–this is my church. I go out into my community, likely the only community I will have for the rest of my life, and I smile at people and I tell them to have a good day. It lights peoples’ faces up. The small shriveled old Asian ladies look suspicious at first sometimes. If they look suspicious in English I try “Ni how” (I know I am spelling that wrong. I probably pronounce it wrong but they don’t yell at me.) or “Chao” because I was told that was ok. (That’s Chinese and Vietnamese for those who don’t automatically recognize my poor battered phonetic spellings.) I do try to guess which one is appropriate in advance. I have a high success rate but not perfect. When I get it wrong they look startled for a moment then laugh. When I switch languages again then they get very happy with me.

People want to feel important. People want to feel like they are worth seeing and speaking to for who they are. Not everyone wants to be told they should be like me and expecting everyone in the world to be happy about hearing English is expecting everyone in the world to be like me. I try to say hello to people because whether they like me or not they are my neighbors. If they need help I will stop and try to help.

Once when I was out running I came across a Vietnamese woman who had tripped and hurt herself. She was probably in her 60’s or 70’s. She was quite frail. I helped her up and I walked her home. I half carried her. She spoke very little English. Just enough to apologize for living. I was very happy to help her. She’s my neighbor. When I was running in SF I went passed an older woman who was carrying heavy bags. She would walk a block then put them down to rest. I happened to go around that block three times (don’t ask why–it wasn’t about her) so I stopped and asked her if I could help. She was so happy. (I can also usefully offer help in Spanish. I’m starting to feel less like I am a pathetic linguist.)

I feel like being part of a community will be the closest I have to a church. I live in Fremont. I am likely to live here forever. I don’t want to treat this like a commuter town or one of my brief stops. I don’t want to sleep here and “live” somewhere else I drive to every day. Ugh. No. I want to meet the people who live near me. I want to get to know faces. I want to have people grow to expect that weird cheerful woman at the park. I want to have a role and a place. I want to belong.

No one wants more tragedy. They don’t go looking for it. One of my favorite things I did as a teacher was when I was doing a unit on tragedy. We were having a huge argument on whether tragedy as a genre was obsolete. My little bastards were campaigning hard to say tragedy was just over. Except one kid. My little gang banger. She dropped out in the middle of my second year with her. I loved her. She told me that she was my Brown Eyes. That was her special name and she wanted me to know it. I think it was the equivalent of being a biker and it being her “ride” name. I could be wrong. Anyway, she came in after school one day and said,

“Gibbs. So. You keep saying that this tragedy shit isn’t dead. I have a song I want you to listen to. I think it might count.” She brought in her ipod and played me a song.

It would be fair to say that the song was impactful on me. It made me cry the first time I heard it and every time thereafter. Yes. That is modern tragedy. Thank you for sharing. So I took that song that my wonderful Brown Eyes brought me and I played in every section I taught. I had them write a response and talk about it. We tore the song apart in terms of figurative language, metaphor, simile, exposition, climax, denoument, blah blah blah. All The Stuff English Teachers Do.

A parent called me (on my cell phone which was hilarious because I forgot I put it on the syllabus and I kind of freaked out at first) to ask about it. She said her son came home saying his English teacher played him a song about a rapper who rapes his mom and she can’t see how that is relavent to English literature thankyouverymuch. I went off for half an hour about music and poetry and literature and how they intertwine and how genres morph and in order to get kids to understand the full scope and power of the language you have to examine different ways of using it and and and. I had a good argument at the time. I don’t remember it well this bright and early morning. The mom thanked me for caring so much about helping her son understand the world and we hung up.

I bring the tragedy with me everywhere I go. I’m kind of Debbie Downer and I deliver. I also smile. Even though I tell the worst stories and make people cry I also make people smile. I’m very good at making people smile.

I am not a graceful runner by any measure. I look pretty funny. That’s ok. I am grinning fit to split my face and I call out a cheerful and ebullient hello to everyone I pass. The only people who don’t smile back are Middle Eastern guys with specific patterns of hair cuts and facial hair. It’s kind of weird. I can predict which three people will scowl at me before they do. There are always three people who scowl at me. Some days there are up to a hundred people who smile at me.

There are the half-smilers who are doing it for social compulsion reasons. I barely count them. Ok, they are part of the crowd but they are kind of tuning me out.

You can’t tell for sure who will light up. That’s a wonderful surprise every time. Often it is the people I have to try multiple languages before they “wake up” and notice I am talking to them. (This all happens fast because I am reasonably speedy.) If someone totally tunes me out in English and I try a second language with no response and I try a third language and they look up sometimes there are tears in their eyes. There was one woman in particular yesterday. She looked up shocked. Then her face transformed. She was beautiful. She looked very sad. I doubt she has had an easy life. She looked so happy to be noticed. I feel kind of bad that I try Chinese before Vietnamese sometimes because I can’t tell Asian races apart very well. I feel like a tremendous asshole. I’m trying. I swear.

If this is the only community I am going to have I need to find a way to fit. I need to find things that I can do that are useful and good. I can’t do a lot for most people in most ways. I can take care of myself and smile at people though.

Which brings me back to people being really fierce about how women don’t owe anyone smiles. No, they don’t. No one owes anyone anything. I don’t owe anyone anything.

I smile and say hello in between crying jags. I do it because it lets me feel like I have some way of interacting with people that is ok. It lets me feel like I am not alone. I greet the people who live near me because that is the civilized thing to do. We share this space. Let’s act like it. Let’s act like we are both real people here and I’m the kind of person who likes to smile at people. I don’t think that everyone has to do it. I don’t get mad at the three people each day who scowl at me. But I keep smiling at everyone. Regardless of the fact that some people won’t smile back.

I don’t smile because anyone owes me anything in response. I smile because I am doing the fake-it-till-you-make-it thing. It does elevate my mood. I like provoking smiles. I like the little half smiles of, “Oh you are one of those people” as much as I like the earnest grins. I like being recognized (with an eye roll) as one of those cheerful people. It’s kind of a relieving experience. It’s nice to be pigeonholed like that instead of as the tragedy girl for a little while. It’s nice when people look at me without flinching.

I smile at people because first impressions are a big thing. People decide a lot about you by what they see first. I try not to be sobbing or a screaming harpy when people first see me. Smiling seems like a better plan.

Ah, and I haven’t done my full confession. At this point I bring before the confessional the unhappy fact that I have now hit Shanna for the second time. I was sitting on the floor with Calli working on something (I can’t even remember what) and Shanna kicked me in the head. The first kick was only like a three or a four (out of a ten pain scale) so I looked up and said, “Please don’t kick me. I don’t like being kicked.” She giggled and kicked me in the head again much much harder. My hand was up smacking her foot away from me before I had time to register a thought. See, this is why I don’t sit around sober. I was waiting for park day so I was fully sober (Have to drive, yo) and I didn’t have that second of pause. With the pause I can grab the foot and prevent it from kicking me again without doing the random arm wave of “Pain! Do not want!” All this to say: I’m not losing sleep and I don’t think I am an abuser.

Thus I have hit my kid twice. Both times she was kicking me quite painfully and I swatted her foot. No guilt. But I did apologize to Shanna immediately. Hitting isn’t the right answer. I’m sorry my impulses aren’t properly under my control.

I want to write about money. I had three, THREE separate friends all say, “I’m having a hard time with money” within a six day period. I feel like I should write about money. Not in this entry. It’s coming.

I think it is interesting how there are discrete mood phases of depression for me. I’m not actively suicidal at the moment and I haven’t had any vivid ideation in at least two days (woo!) so instead I’m in kind of a hazy place where I have slightly more energy and I want to be interacting and I want to be giving more to people (I hate the fact that I need so much help right now–I feel like a using piece of shit.) but I can clearly see how I don’t really have it to spare. So it’s like I’m wandering around my kitchen with a big box and I’m slowly trying to decide which things to give to the food pantry but… uhm… all that food is in my kitchen because I’m supposed to feed my family with it. It isn’t “extra”. But I still want to give it away. I will feel better about myself if I give it away. My family will just figure it out, right? We’ll just do without.  But I can’t. I can’t do that to my kids all the time.

Once I asked my mom about her childhood. She said she was never important. When she was little her parents cared about her older siblings. When her older siblings started moving out her mother started fostering and the foster kids were way more important than her. The foster kids would show up with clothes and toys from their home of origin and my mother wasn’t allowed to touch their things. But they would steal my moms stuff and break it. She got in trouble if she complained because she wasn’t being properly charitable. My mom said that sometimes her mother would buy a special doll for a foster kid so the kid felt loved while she didn’t have one at all. Her mom would say, “But you have other blessings. God isn’t equal to everyone. You need to be grateful for what you have.”

I think about my mom a lot. I think about how badly she was treated by her parents and her siblings and her husband. She was at the bottom of the shit hill until I was born. My sister kind of took a turn there but not really. My mom protected her the way I protect Shanna. My sister was never really at the bottom of the hill. I think about what it did to my mom. I think about what she grew up to be.

I plot in advance what things I should or should not say to people in order to increase the likelihood that they will like me. I’m confident this is normal. Noah appears to be done with his internetting. That was like 45 minutes of writing. I’ll stop now.

Haunted

Running is getting harder. There are a few things going on. For one thing I am dealing with the cumulative of suddenly doing massive amounts of exercise when I have never done so before. It’s an experience. But mostly I am struggling because of how my body is changing. As I lose weight/change shape/harden/whatever I can feel the bones of my brother Tommy coming through in my face.

This is weird and hard to describe. The more time I spend looking at Calli and the more time I spend running the more conscious I am of how my skull resembles my brother. And my running gait is embarrassingly like his. Embarrassing because Tommy had a severe traumatic brain injury. He didn’t run. He lurched. He looked awkward and weird. It was a miracle he walked at all so folks considered it a real big deal.

One year, in Apple Valley, he was on a disabled kids sports team, softball. I remember how Tommy looked running the bases. I move like that. I feel weird when I run. I lurch awkwardly to the side. I have trouble figuring out how to balance my weight. I almost trip a lot. I kind of go back and forth on the side walk.

Except for sometimes when I hit my stride just right and I feel like I am flying. Then I feel Tommy. Then I remember how he would smile the few times he really managed to get going quickly. That wild ebullition on his face. I feel that way when I am running really fast.

I often wonder what my life would have been like if I had lived in one place. If someone had looked at me as a small child and said, “Running quickly makes you feel good. Let’s work with this.” I was told to go to my room with a book and shut up. So I’m pretty awkward when I run. I have run more this year than the entire rest of my life combined.

Tommy hated me. Before the accident he was nasty and mean, “No one wanted you. Why were you born? Can’t you die already?” After the accident he was brutal and vicious.

Tommy’s speech was very difficult to understand. He had trouble enunciating and an average sentence would take multiple breaths and minutes to deliver. He hated me because I could hear the first three words and finish his sentences. “You rude, stupid bitch.” He hit me a lot. A really lot. When I think of myself as “not being all that physically abused” what I mean is my mom gave me four really memorable beatings and that’s it. My siblings hurt me all the time. That “didn’t count.”

Once, Tommy was screaming at me. I don’t remember what I did. Maybe nothing. Maybe something. I don’t know. He got as far as, “You are” and I finished, “a stupid worthless bitch, yeah I know” and I didn’t even look up from my book.

I remember the sound of inhaled breath. Then I don’t remember anything until I woke up on the floor. He hit me in the head. I don’t know how long I was unconscious. No one paid attention or cared. I don’t think I was unconscious very long. I think I managed to scramble up and away before he managed the physical dexterity to kick me. Either that or he did it once before I was awake. Regardless I got away just as he was trying to deliver a hard kick. He fell down. He crawled after me screaming that he was going to kill me. He wasn’t going to deal with such a stupid bitch any longer. He should have killed me a long time ago.

That was why I spent a lot of time in the willow tree in the yard. He didn’t have the arm strength to climb any more. I love climbing trees. I still love climbing trees.

That was Tuesday.

Essentially what I’m saying is: having running be a constant reminder of my brother is a mixed thing. I kind of wish I knew what Jimmy looks like when he runs. I’m not sure I have ever seen him run. In high school he was a state finalist. He was quite good.

Running fast is a gene. You have it or you don’t. (Based on what I’ve read.) I don’t know if I truly have it or not but I know I have never tried. It’s not until you are an adult many years later that you can admit to yourself that as a kid you never tried. You never really gave it a go. You have to be honest with yourself.

The only time I ran was when someone was chasing me. I rarely got away. Usually I was caught and had the shit beat out of me.

I think I am afraid of Shanna getting older. She is so like me. I’m afraid she is going to be a lightning rod for people who want to beat the hell out of her as well. I hope not.

When I was nineteen I asked Tom to crucify me. We used rope instead of nails (I’m not that hard core) and we built a padded back board with a cross piece together. Even if you are just tied to a board, being suspended in that position with all of your weight hanging is rather intense. Especially if you stay up for a long time. I certainly got to the point of hallucination from insufficient air and blood circulation.

I saw Tommy and I saw my dad. At that point they had been dead for about three years. The hallucinations didn’t talk to me at all. They just looked at me kind of dispassionately. I am not theirs but I don’t belong to any one else. When I was nineteen I felt it was pretty clear that I was good for one thing–being hurt a lot. That was the one currency I had to buy affection. I can take a lot of pain. I can take a lot of degradation. It just feels normal to me.

I’m having this weird body experience as  I run. I can tell where my body is going to start siphoning energy from fat stores. I’ve watched the various fat pockets on my body (I have a lot of them) over this year. As I run the fat jiggles, quite a bit–really. On a scale of 1-10, 1 being you can barely feel it and 10 being “cut my leg off because it hurts so much” then my fat jiggling is normally in the 2-3 range. I can feel it but it doesn’t hurt. Except when my body is nursing from a given area. I can’t find a better way of thinking about it. We are actively stealing from that spot right now. When I can feel my body stealing from a spot that fat pocket starts hurting at more like the 4-5 level. It starts to feel like pain. Then a week or so later I notice that it is a lot smaller. It’s kind of weird. I didn’t know bodies did this.

I am doing a lot of compensatory eating. I’m a little more than ten pounds heavier than I was in March for the half marathon. I’m very depressed. I’m eating a lot of sugar and crying while I do it. I don’t want my body to be smaller. I hate that I feel more and more like Tommy. Fuck that. I’ll eat ice cream. There’s a lot of ice cream in this world. I don’t have to fucking feel Tommy’s bones coming through. Fuck him. Fuck him. Fuck him.

Yesterday was an eight mile run then the girls and I did a round trip three mile walk for the park. I’m sore and tired. But I’ll do five miles today. And eighteen miles on Saturday.

I’m not going to let Tommy take this away from me. I’m pretty sure he has hurt me enough for one life.

Today isn’t starting well.

I would call this morning a comedy of errors but that would imply that I thought some of it was funny. I’m not laughing. I hate how one fuck up has long-reaching consequences.

So my washing machine broke. I ended up having to bring clothes to a laundromat. I lost a load, apparently. I don’t fucking know how. So I don’t have the blanket for my bed or a few pieces of other random clothes and a bunch of towels. One of the pieces of clothing were my best pair of running pants. By “best pair” I mean the most comfortable. They had many holes in the seems. The only reason they stayed up was because of a sturdy draw string. BUT THEY HAD POCKETS.

So today I need to run eight miles. Noah is having a hard time in a variety of ways so I stayed in bed with him until past my normal running time which means the kids came in with us. One thing lead to another and I wasn’t starting out to run until I had been awake for more than three hours. I haven’t eaten anything. I’m starting to get jittery and psycho.

And the only god damn pair of clean fucking pants are my painting pants. They are yoga pants that are about seven years old, a size too big, and they’ve been through two full pregnancies with me. By the fourth step they are completely down around my hips. By the sixth step they are starting to try to be below my bottom.

And I forgot to charge my phone last night because the kids were on a roll. It was a very long and busy day. So I wasn’t going to be able to listen to any music on this pity party death march. But I brought my phone anyway to see if the mapping program would work. I had to wear the water backpack in order to have a place to carry the phone.

I uhhh apparently didn’t seal the bag properly. So me and my phone got completely soaked within the first block. I walked back to my house threw the bag violently against the house and gently set my phone down on the kitchen counter to try again. I got a mile before I sat down on a neighbors driveway to cry. No. I can’t run like this.

My phone is becoming a frequent problem on runs. The battery won’t last through a four hour run. It goes completely dead just after three hours. Not to mention that my Android phone has decided it no longer needs to load Google mail or Google talk.

All of these are stupid, small problems that can be solved with a little bit of time and/or money. Neither of which I have before going running this morning. So I’m not going running this morning. Hopefully I will find time later today to run. I am not up for this fucking death march of sobbing this morning. God damn ridiculous. With pants that won’t fucking stay up. I’m about to just start running in jeans. At least they fucking fit.

My penultimate pair of running shoes (I had to replace the Stem’s. Apparently that company changed names. I don’t like them as much now) were a switch from the strictly “running” Vibrams to “multi-sport” because they were $40 less. They tore my feet to shreds. I have horrible burst open blisters and these deep weirdly ridged callouses. After two weeks.

Running is getting harder and harder. 45 days. I’m not very good at shoving myself out of bed in the still-dark to go run in the mornings. I feel bitter and angry and pissy. I want to hit things and scream. I don’t. fucking. want. to. But Noah’s work schedule has been harder lately. And when push comes to shove I have to be the flexible one. Which means I have to god damn suck it up and I should probably be out running at 5:30 so that I get it done before I am shaking with hunger and hating everyone in the whole fucking world.

I feel really resentful right now. I was supposed to have till the youngest kid was three. Well, fuck me. That was too long to ask for.

I’m grateful someone asked me if she could take my kids to the zoo today. Yes. Yes. Yes. I need a fucking break. I need to do laundry. And clean the disgusting bathroom. And cry without having to be polite about it.

Fuck everything.

neeeeeeedy

I wanted to write about fifteen miles while it was fresh in my mind. I didn’t. It was euphoric and triumphant. Tomorrow morning I am going to do sixteen miles. I’m changing directions slightly for the early part and adding hill. I’m a little nervous. I’m hoping to once again make it in four hours. That’s cocky. That’s really cocky. We are meeting at the same place. Mmmm rewarding noodles.

It’s hard knowing that it is probably smart for people to keep me out at arms length. If you keep me out at arms length I never start to have expectations of you. I won’t let myself feel like I need something from you. For me to have needs in the direction of people is usually the kiss of death. Noah is the last man standing.

Does that make me straight?

I think about that a lot lately. I think about self-identity. What is the point? The point is that if someone wants to know what the difference is between having sex with someone who is transgendered, transvestite, or a butch dyke I can describe it in great detail from personal experience. It was all fun.

Sometimes I look at Noah and feel kind of weird. It’s sort of ironic that I married someone from a small Texas town who had some kind of semi-status from inherited position there. Given my history I mean. And together we are very cis-gendered.

What does being queer mean, anyway?

What does being a “runner” mean? If I walk sixteen miles tomorrow because I am tired am I a “runner”?

I have endurance. I am persistant to the limits I can achieve with my body. I’m not naturally athletic or gifted. I’m stubborn. I’m angry. I’m sad. I have so much grief. I want to prove to myself that I am as good as my brother. No, I’m not as fast as him. I hope he has matured to the point where he wouldn’t be an asshole about that. I think so.

I’m scared to see him and I’m scared not to see him. He despises me. He despises what I have done and who I am and that I had the utter gall to talk about it in public. But I’m going to drive my husband nuts with having to accomodate me as I train for a marathon on my brother’s turf.

Fuck you. You can’t tell me that I am weak. I am here. And at the end I will still be standing.

Lately I feel very weak. I have a lot of needs that are going unmet. I’m getting brittle. It’s hard because I can only handle asking someone to meet a need of mine if I am very ok with the answer being “no”. If I can’t take a no then I can’t ask. If I ask when I can’t afford to be told no and I don’t get help I will turn my frustration and rage on my unsuspecting friend. That’s not fair. I don’t do that.

Right now there is a towering avalanche of need. But I am so afraid of saying the wrong thing or offending people or being disappointed that I don’t know how to deal with any of it. There are a lot of different things going on right now I can’t talk about in writing. That’s hard for me. That feels silencing. That makes me feel angry on top of whatever I’m feeling anyway.

I’m sure some rational person would say, “Well why don’t you just write it and keep it private then”.

I don’t know. I learned a long time ago that I don’t write for me, exactly. I can only write if I believe someone is reading it. I have never been able to consistently maintain a paper journal but if someone speaks up and says, “By the way I read your blog every day. I care about you.” Motherfucker I’ll write every day. I’ll find the time. I will conjure it out of thin air.

It feels sick. This need in me to be seen. I started crying earlier when I realized I treat that ridiculous random validation as the closest thing I will ever have to a mother checking in on me. I feel so alone in the world. Multiple people asked me if I was ok.

It’s kind of hard for me when people notice me. I feel like Eeyore. I used to play games with not posting on my blog for months at a stretch and people didn’t notice. I took that as validation that people wouldn’t notice or be particularly impacted if I died. It actually made me feel better. Because suicide was an option that would be far less selfish for me than most people. Before I got married. Before I had kids.

I don’t have anyone in my life other than Noah with whom I have an intense on-going relationship. Ok, Shanna and Calli. Every other person in my life spends very few hours with me during the course of a year.

If I don’t write on the internet, do I exist?

If I don’t write on the internet I am surely invisible. My pragmatic self says that if I don’t write on the internet people only know the handful of sentences we exchange in person. That isn’t knowing me even slightly. From that I will decide I should be invisible. I will always believe that is just and right and the natural order of things. People like me are born bad. We should suffer in silence. If we talk about what is going on in our minds then we are traumatizing people and we don’t have the right to do that.

I’m scared of the hunt for a new therapist. During my last search I had a few one time only visits. Including with someone who told me point blank that I should never participate in group therapy or write about my experiences in a public way because that is abusive and traumatizing to the people who hear or read about my life. I don’t have the right to do that.

I have to be very careful who I allow to be an authority in my life. I have done too many things that make me already damned in the eyes of many. For a great many people I am already beyond redemption. If you think I am exaggerating then you have lead a very privileged life. I have to be careful who I allow to judge me. Well, I have to be careful if I am going to care about that judgment.

So when people tell me to just “get over” my experiences. Well, despite the fact that it makes me feel pathetic I may well be in therapy the rest of my life. They are going to always be the longest running relationships in my life outside of Noah and the kids. I need to have something. It’s very easy to deem this need pathetic if you have ways of getting your needs met that are simply not available to me.

I don’t know who are what I am defending myself against. The voices in my head. The reasons my throat feels choked all the time. I should be silent. Just shut up. Just listen. Nothing you have to say is interesting any way. Stop. Fucking. Whining.

I go to bed and wake up thinking that I want to die. I want to stop feeling this way. It hurts to move. It hurts all the time. And I don’t know what to do other than wait it out. That’s what I’ve always done. But this time I can’t do any of the impulsive things I have always done. It’s really hard. I feel like I am vibrating with tension. My muscles radiate.

I need to stretch more. I need to sleep more. I need to rest more. I need.. I need a mommy I can call and say, “Come love my babies for me so I can sleep.” But I don’t have one. And that’s just life.

I have to believe that my grief matters. Whether any one else does or not. I have to. I miss my mother. The price I pay for being allowed to go about my life without being abused is that aching hole inside me. There is a cost to everything. I miss my mother. I miss my mother like I would miss an amputated limb. I reach for her. I smell her. I see her in the mirror and in my children.

I want my mother so much I feel like I am going to explode. But contacting her would be the worst thing in the world. For everyone. For me. For my kids. For my mom. Because if I yo-yo back and forth and ask them to make it up to me I am setting myself up in the power position. I’m saying I want to be the next abuser. No. No. No.

There is a lot more I want to say. There isn’t much more I can dance around with anything resembling eloquence. And besides, I have to get up and walk (I will jog!) sixteen miles.

I will be able to call myself a marathoner. I’ll be crafty and specific. I didn’t saying “running”. That way I deal with no assholes and I still make my point.

It feels pathetic to want to figure out who I am. I am nothing. I came from nothing that should be. Nothing I can claim. I am nothing on my own in the world. I exist in relationship to three people.

I’m telling you people, my family had better not die in a freak crash without me. I won’t make it through the day. I’m only a little paranoid about them dying. But I do cry if the word comes through my head. I can’t lose them. They are all I have.

I need sleep. Sleep. Go to sleep. Stop crying. Sleep. Stretch first. It’ll be ok. Really. It’s always ok in the end. If it’s not ok yet, it’s not the end. If you’re going through hell, etc.

Mental illness is a liar.

Sustainable loads

Brain chemistry is unpredictable. I try to stay level but unfortunately my brain is extra hard to predict. I’m trying to go to sleep earlier. The kids have been very disrupted lately. I only need seven or so hours of sleep and it’s a good idea for me to go to sleep at 8pm if I want to get a full night of sleep. That feels lame. Yet I feel like sleep is one of the biggest factors between me and emotional stability lately. I’m very under slept and as a result I am weepy and depressed. It’s lame.

I don’t like that I cry in front of my kids so much. I feel like that is a bad lesson. I try to explain it to Shanna in a fairly value neutral way. “I had life experiences that make it unusually easy for me to cry. It’s kind of weird and annoying. Not everyone does this–in fact most people don’t. But I cry as I’m just going about my daily life. It’s inconvenient but it’s not always a sign that anything is wrong right now. I do like hugs and kisses, thank you. I’m glad you are here. I have a lot more reason to be happy now.” That’s pretty much my schpeal.

I feel humiliated when I have to casually explain how and why I am defective compared to so-called normal people. The more extreme I worry my current sense of symptoms are (I have very little ability to judge this as life goes–I can be retrospective but in the moment evaluation is hard) the more I struggle with being out in public. I don’t want my kids to be tarred with the same crazy brush I am tarred with.

I feel like a whiner. I am in the very safest period of my life right now. I haven’t been raped in eight years. I should stop feeling paranoid and scared, right? The more than two decades when I was raped over and over are done. Get over it.

Yeah. You go do it. If you think it is so fucking easy you do it. Wait, you weren’t raped over and over for two decades so you don’t know what that even means? Oh. Then shut the fuck up already.

It sounds like an excuse. My brain is *wired* to feel fear and distrust. I was brought up in an abusive environment. I volunteered for a PTSD brain scan study at Stanford. I was told that my case is too complicated to be useful for research. I’m pretty damn sure my brain is non-standard. And I have to deal with that. And it sounds like whining to people who do not have similar brain patterns.

“Hey, whiner, stop having your life experiences and start having my life experiences so you can act like me and I can feel comfortable.”

Wait. Yeah. Too late.

I feel like a whiner because I can’t function under the same constraints as a lot of people I know. I simply cannot be as busy as they are. I can’t think. I cry all the time. I’m scared. I can’t follow simple directions because I am shaking and unable to think coherently and learn new information. This isn’t my fault. This is simply how going through the world works for me.

What do I need? I need less going on. I need to not feel guilty because I’m not providing Shanna exactly what some people are having. She’s having a good life even though she isn’t having the same experiences as her peers. She won’t be permanently fucked up by not being in contact with people exactly her age all day every day. Truly. Biologically that is not normal. But I feel guilty. She would love it.

Life is full of a lot of different paths. I did go out yesterday and buy her a bunch of craft supplies that she wanted. She is thrilled. She has doileys and pom poms and glitter and pipe cleaners and glue sticks and popsicle sticks. It’s in the budget. I’m supposed to buy this stuff. She has paint and play-dough substitute. She does play with children. She just doesn’t do it all day in a place where someone else will clean up her mess because they are paid to do so.

I distinctly notice a difference in how the kids play based on how clean the house is. When things are put away and orderly they are capable of cleaning stuff up as they are done with it and putting it away. They won’t do it at all if the house is messy. And when the house is basically tidy they go from one imaginative game to another all day. When the house is messy they whine at me to read to them or for the iPad. It’s interesting to watch. When the house is basically clean  I spend an hour or two on chores in the early morning and then spend the rest of the day on stuff where I am “interruptable”. If the house is a huge mess I get bitchy and tense.

I’m not being very nice lately. I have too many projects ongoing. I need to finish things and back off. I’m looking forward to the marathon so much. I need a break from running. I need to move on and do something more approachable for people in my life. Seven weeks.

I really and truly didn’t think she would say yes when I told her, “You know, if you ran 20 miles this weekend you could *totally* handle a marathon in seven weeks. Just sayin’.” Now she has plane tickets. She’s going to run with me. She will pace me. I know that no matter how scared and apprehensive I am in advance she will get me through. That’s this enormous comfort. I’m shit at pacing. It’s just not a skill I have developed yet. She’s really good at it. She has a lot of practice. This will be her first marathon too. I feel extremely weepy at the idea of being part of her “first” experience. That feels special. She’s doing something new and hard with me. Gosh. That feels like a big deal. I feel really loved.

I think about Sarah a lot as I run. It’s been enough months of her not speaking to me that I feel like I can probably call it done and try to move on. It’s hard. I feel like we spent so much time reacting to our phantom issues with our respective mothers that we didn’t really get around to looking at each other. We are both broken in different ways. I feel like the biggest asshole on the planet because a big part of my problem was that I really and truly could not physically handle another adult showing up in my house who needed me to do a bunch of cleaning for her. I thought I could. I really did. I knew she would be hard to clean up after. I thought I could do it. I failed. I feel bad that I couldn’t handle being the support she needs. I think she deserves it. But I can’t do it.

I’m so sorry that I failed her and hurt her. I do that. I do that a lot. I feel like it is inevitable that I will do it with/for everyone. I will fail you. I will hurt you. It feels like it is an unavoidable part of being me. I am a failure. I hurt everyone just by existing. If I could shut my stupid, selfish, self-absorbed mouth maybe I could learn to be a decent person. Naw. That’s a pipe dream.

I feel so guilty for all the things I can’t be. I feel ashamed of myself. Why can’t I just be normal? I’m not even sure I know what that means. Whatever it means it would involve wiping my memory so that I no longer react from the point of view I have always had. I am defective.

Today I am going to can tomatoes. And mail two boxes. One cross country and one internationally. The boxes won’t have tomatoes in them. But those are my tasks for today. That is all I can have on my agenda if I want to be nice to my kids. Because they need some attention today. I’ve been ignoring them a lot lately as I finish the garage. I need to figure out earthquake strapping. I think this is how my house is going to look for the next ten years. It’s time to strap things to the walls. I’ve never done earthquake preparedness with furniture before. If you move your furniture every 3-6 months then it truly isn’t worth the effort to strap it to the wall over and over. You make holes in the walls and landlords hate you. My life is different now.

Every day of my life is blazing a new path. I have never lived in a stable environment for this long. I have never had ongoing daily relationships that have gone on this long. In another two or three years I will have lived with Shanna longer than I ever lived with my brothers at all. Probably about how much time I lived with my sister if you add it all up. Longer than I ever lived with my mother in one go. Far far longer than I lived with my father.

I’m scared of depending on her in inappropriate ways. I’m less scared of it with Calli, which is weird. When I ask Shanna if I can keep her forever she says yes enthusiastically. When I ask Calli if I can keep her she smiles and says no. She says, “Baby bye bye.” I’m just not real worried about having an odd overly dependent codependent relationship with Calli. Kid has boundaries. Shanna is my me-not-me.

Shanna is good at asking me why I am experiencing an emotion. She’s really good at figuring out, “Oh you are frustrated because I did ______ but you weren’t frustrated last time I did it. Why are you frustrated this time?” That seems weirdly complex from a four year old to me. But I explain, “Well last time I was able to focus on only you and I wasn’t in the middle of something else and last time the spill was water instead of juice and juice is sticky. And…” I try to talk about things in a level voice. “Well I find this frustrating because I dislike having to do _________.” It’s not about her. It’s about what I am doing. It’s about how many ways my attention is divided.

I’m trying hard to train her to come and find me and declare, “Mother! I had an idea! I must experiment!” Then when I find a huge mess I don’t get mad at her. I gird my loins and do my deep breathing exercises before I come to see what she did. It works out.

Everyone who parents does so from a self-centered point of view. This little amoeba is in orbit around your life. What does that mean? What kind of support do you need? What do they do all day to facilitate you getting to do what you want to do all day?

I want to can tomatoes. And mail boxes. I assume we will walk to the post office. It will be a multi-hour walk. We will probably come home by way of the park. That’s about a 3.5 mile loop. Shanna needs to get out and exercise. We haven’t done much this week. Let me rephrase: I have been fucking exhausted from the 32 miles I am running this week so I haven’t done as much at Shanna’s speed. It kind of changes the tone, no? It’s not that I am lazy. I’m tired. I’m sore. I think a slow walk will be good today. Stretch out my legs before I run 16 miles tomorrow. Ew.

But I feel like an asshole. Because I am supposed to be facilitating her life. Naw. Children are supposed to orbit around their parents. That is how it works. For the next seven weeks her life is impacted by the fact that I am too physically tired to do what I normally do with her. It won’t kill her. Maybe she will learn something about the physical requirements of taking athletics seriously. Not that I am a serious athlete. But I’m as tired as one.

I feel like my weakness is inexcusable. Suck it up. Get moving. There is a limit to how much I can do that. I can’t be miserable all day every day and function. I can only suck up so many things. I’m terribly sorry so much of my brain cycles are wasted on things that happened long ago. I would give just about anything to change it. My understanding is time will help and pretty much nothing else. I have to be patient and wait for things to get better. Stop fucking rushing me. It takes as long as it takes. Oh wait, I’m not perfectly mentally healthy on the schedule you think I should keep? Let me care about that. I think I have 2.4 seconds free a week from Tuesday.

I was told when I was pregnant with Shanna that people like me shouldn’t have children. It may be true. But it’s too late. They are here. I am here. We have to do the best we can. In the overall scheme of things I think my kids are doing very well. They get the occasional shriek of frustration from me over large messes but I think I am fairly patient. I got the shit beat out of me for things that I barely react to. I feel like I am doing well. The only marker I have for behavior says that I am really awesome and patient and wonderful. I’m not perfectly patient, but I’m not sure that is useful either. My kids will grow up with a slow life because of me.

Some days all we will do is can tomatoes and walk to the post office. That’s ok. I am actually preparing them for the world. Last I checked it wasn’t terribly important for me to sit and do worksheets all day. I guess all those years of preparing I did was kind of useless. I was extensively trained in how to fill out forms. Sure, I do great in the DMV. I’m not sure it needed thirteen years of harping.

Life is complicated. Things that are mandatory parts of life for lots of people are completely absent from the lives of every one else. We feel our priorities are important because they are what we know.

What do I need to do to get through the next seven weeks with as little impact on the kids as possible? I keep feeling like I should schedule. But then I’m depressed and tired and I want too much from myself and I stop doing it again. What is reasonable to expect of myself? I don’t even know. I really don’t.

Running buddy

I wrote up a long post yesterday. Apparently my computer ate it. Internet in my house is very flakey. I am not impressed. Thank you to the folks who are worried about me. I appreciate people checking in. It makes me feel loved. I was pinged more than once yesterday. It made me smile.

Life is really busy. I’m anxious and fussy and exhausted. I’m thinking a lot. I’m really struggling with the running. In a fit of desperation yesterday I poked a friend and strongly hinted that she would be physically capable of doing the marathon with me. I didn’t think it would go anywhere. I was being a pest. Within an hour or so she had arranged to fly from a different state and stay with her family so she can run with me. She’ll pretty much only be there for the race. So she can hold my hand.

I need to go run and cry about how very unworthy I am right now. I’m really grateful that I have her to look forward to at the end of this training, now. It gives me a lot more impetus to not quit. I’ve been feeling sad and overwhelmed. I can do the running. I am struggling to deal with the fact that this running is making me too tired to really be functional doing a lot of other things. I have seven weeks of training to go. It’s feeling too long. Too hard. But now I can’t quit. Now there is no option in any way shape or form of quitting.

I’m really glad. I was starting to feel like a quitter in my head. Like there isn’t a point in me doing this. There isn’t much point in me doing anything besides wiping other peoples asses and washing dishes.

But someone wants to run with me. I won’t be alone. I’ve been singing various songs about her. Her name rhymes with “don’t have to be alone” if you get the syllables right. I don’t understand why she cares enough about me to just up and do this. But I’m really grateful. I’m really grateful.

It will be a very long day.

I have a theory as to why significantly more men than women run marathons. It’s because men don’t have to bleed every month. Today I have to run a half marathon and then go work a full shift at Wicked Grounds (come visit, ok?). I started bleeding yesterday. I’m pretty fucking uncomfortable. My lower back is quite unhappy with life.

What I would like to do right now is get an old fashioned hot water bottle and fill it and a new fangled heating pad. I want to lie in the fetal position with the hot water on the front of my belly and the heating pad on my lower back. Instead I am going to get dressed in that rabidly uncomfortable sports bra (My last long run caused me to get a rash from rubbing) and run for three or so hours. Because of how my body feels I’m going to aim for three and a half hours. Which is more than twenty minutes longer than my previous time for this distance. I hurt.

I should probably take some pain medication. Today will probably also be a day for caffeine. I have to start running no later than 5:30 if I want to do everything on time today. It’s going to be a very long day. I’ve already been up for a while taking care of Calli.

But I’m a fucking bad ass and I can do anything. Time to run.