Category Archives: running

Compulsions

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I’m obsessively staring at my training schedule. I’m scared. This week I run twenty miles for the first time this round. Woof. The peak of training gives me forty miles in a week. I am lovingly and loathingly (yes I know that isn’t a word) noticing that hell week is my birthday week. I turn thirty-one and then immediately have to run forty miles in the five days following. I don’t fuck around.

I’m scared and elated. I’m going to do this. It can be done by a human being therefore it is god damn going to be done by me. I will. I won’t fuck this up. Perseverance is one of my more admirable attributes. Tenacious as a honey badger. I tell myself while running in my “Badass as a Honey Badger” tshirt. I’m the exact opposite of sexy.

I don’t know how to be this person in the world. I don’t know how to be open to people and yet not available. I have committed my life and all that I am elsewhere. How do I have time for other people? You just do. You have to. You have to be part of something bigger. At least I do. I need to have friendships. I’m having trouble keeping my panties on. I have a hard time not sitting on peoples laps. That is how I break the ice. But that’s ice I don’t need to be breaking ever again. Awkward.

There is this reserve developing. Now there are parts of me I will defend with a machete. Off limits. It is scary for me to think about having to say no at some point. I am nervous because I like to stand in places where asking is significantly more friendly than not asking. Most folks go out to hunt. I don’t even know what I’m hunting for.

I want people who want to know my kids. Who want to part of my familial dynamic. Who want to have a real space in my life. Most people fill these roles with family. Most people think of friendships as low stakes. I will always be a low stakes relationship. I will always be who they see when people are “avoiding their family”.

Part of what I have been thinking about while running lately is how it isn’t my fault I don’t have a family. It’s not like I am less deserving than other people. But you roll the dice and you take what you get. There is no deserving in life. I am not physically capable of keeping the silence my family of origin required of me. That just can’t be asked of me. Too late. I’m an evil liar, blah blah, whatever. It doesn’t matter what I deserve. It matters what I can create with my hands and my mind. It matters what effect I have on the world.

When I ask former students what I taught them they say that I taught them to like themselves. That’s a fuck load more than my family did for me. My family taught me that when the men and boys in my family couldn’t find a willing pussy it was my job to lie down and provide.

What can I create? What can I be? What matters? If you can’t be a good example be a horrible warning?

I don’t know. I’m afraid to take pride in anything. I don’t want to develop a weak spot where I can be attacked. I don’t want to feel insecure about someone letting me know that I actually really suck at that thing I think I am good at. I am terrified to build myself up.

I’m well into training for a marathon. I don’t talk about it much in person. I don’t think anyone gives a shit. I think they listen with glazed eyes so I should just shut up and let them tell me what they are doing. That’s all they care about anyway. Why don’t I brag about this? I’m fucking doing it. I’m out running four days a week and stretching and doing strength training. I’m doing it. I’m not going to win speed records and that’s ok! Doing this is a fairly big deal. Why do I minimize this to myself? Why do I act like I’m not doing this good enough? Why do I feel like if I am doing it then it must not be that hard. I’m nothing special. If I can do it then it must not be a big deal. Talking about it is rather fraught, so I don’t.

It’s kind of weird, this being a writer. I have been blogging fairly consistently for nearly nine years. A number of people have read basically all of it. That’s a large body of knowledge about my life. But it was acquired in a room without me in it. There was no shared intimacy. This is very similar to the sexual exhibitionism. I feel like a freak because I can’t talk about a period of my life without talking about how and why my sexuality went through a massive change. And for me that has meant a lot of different partners and different approaches to sex. I understand why my former therapist asked me pointed questions about multiple personalities.

If I make sure people only see me in a certain set of circumstances with a certain environment I can tailor my behavior. I can be appropriate with great effort. If I keep people out at arms length. That’s kind of awkward with this whole out thing. Now I don’t really know what people are thinking about when they look at me. Oh holy fucking shit. For most of my writing life I’ve known the dozen or so people who seriously followed my writing. We had dinner so that I could fill in the bits on the stories I won’t tell in public. I tailor what I share with the world. I feel odd wondering what that actually looks like. How close is it to me?

What is more real, after all? The image that I carefully construct in writing (or rather the image that free form spews out of my brain never to be looked at or thought about again–I couldn’t reread the volume I produce; there isn’t enough time in the day) or how I behave? I’m never really sure. If you are judging me by how I behave then which group of friends will you judge by? I’m very different in different settings.

Compulsive hypersexuality is kind of a funny thing. If I think back I can see parallel lines between when I started smoking pot and when I stopped sleeping around. I guess I traded addictions. I am a very compulsive person. Right now I’m having a hard time with food. I’m having trouble respecting my body’s “full” signal. I’m making myself hurt. And I’m gaining weight… while training for a marathon. I’m eating a lot.

I’m scared because I think I’m getting closer to one of those periods where I feel the need to experience pain. That was how it worked with Tom. That was what our relationship did for me. I stayed with Tom instead of cutting. He was a reliable source of discomfort. He provided the hogties that fueled his masturbatory life and he was willing to play a lot harder to meet my needs. I think I came up with most of our heaviest play. In no way shape or form was I a victim. But I’m very compulsive. And I have a strong disinterest in my continued physical safety. Or had, anyway.

It is weird looking over at Noah. He’s biting his finger nail. He’s the only person I will ever have sex with again. Well, barring early death. If he kicks the bucket I’m not staying celibate for his memory. I’m not that devoted. He wouldn’t either and fair is fair. It’s weird looking at him. I get to sit here and have this intense feeling of power and ownership. He is mine. I don’t have to check his google calendar so I can schedule a date with my husband. I don’t have to know when he is out dating and fill that time carefully in a way I can handle without crying or freaking out. He does go out and do things occasionally, but it is rare. What he is doing with his time is hanging out with his kids and his wife. I feel really special. This really amazing person wants me. He does have kind of a funny hunch back. I guess we truly are perfect for each other. I’m not quite Beauty and he’s not quite the Beast. He’s not all the way to Quasimodo either so he still works for me. Definitely cute enough to be the hero.

While I’m running I’m playing over the years in my head. What am I going to write about? Which relationships are the most important? How can I show the pivotal times and places and people? How am I going to set the different tones of the different parts of my life? How am I going to make it obvious in text that my behavior radically changes based on where I am standing? How do I make an image of me that is real and true?

The first book was what happened to me. A lot of it I couldn’t change. I could have made different decisions, maybe. Whatever. It’s over. What happened when I was an adult is different. I had agency. I made choices. I acted. I wanted. I was compulsive. I learned to manage my compulsions in a variety of ways. What did that trial and error process look like? What bridges did I burn and when and how and why in the process? I’m trying to get my head around the whole story arc and it feels so large. So complex. I feel like a freak as I carefully compare the continuing evolution of my behavior in separate, non-adjacent parts of my life. What did I learn? How did I learn it?

I don’t know. I can’t find an object lesson in my life. I survived. I just did. That was all I did. I can’t make a lesson out of it. Maybe it is closer to a horrible warning. I feel bad about that though. I’m not. I have had a fairly decent adulthood. I want to explain why rape is just such a casual part of my life. I want to really work through all the connections between different parts of myself growing up.

Tom gave me a safe space to grow up. He hurt me when I asked nicely so that I could deal with my urge to self mutilate. After Tom I went on to drugs and a rather indecent amount of casual sex. And graduate school. And teaching. And dancing. More travel.

I’ve done a lot of things. Not all of it has been sex. Yet when I think of myself I see nothing of potential interest outside of sex. That says a lot about my priorities.

I am trying to figure out how to be proud of myself without sounding like I am bragging. I’m not bragging. I’m telling the truth. Sometimes the truth sounds cool and sometimes it sounds fucking embarrassing. Bah humbug. It’s time to go to sleep.

A Tuesday morning ramble.

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I’ve had several nearly-fully-formed posts running around in my head for days. Now that I am at the computer? Nada. Typical.

I have been increasing the amount I socialize lately. That is a mixed bag. It means more dealing with people. That’s hard. Being around large crowds of people who are questionably friendly to me is exhausting. The funny part is, one of my default “I’m hiding how I feel” mannerisms is to smile and nervously giggle a great deal. It seems like other people can’t tell the giggling is nervous. So they think I am having a fabulous time. It’s a great cover and I have been working on it for a long time.

I went out dancing on Saturday night. I explicitly told the two friends I was meeting there, “I am here because you two will keep me from hiding in the bathroom and crying.” They were shocked to find out that was a possibility. I don’t have the heart to really explain that without them doing that it isn’t a possibility it is an inevitability. Getting to the dance event is hard. Once I’m there it’s not like I’m out of danger.

I asked two men who were strangers-to-me to dance. Both of them looked at me, kind of twitched, then said they were sitting this dance out and walked away from me quickly. After the second one I didn’t ask again. I danced with my two girl-friends, and three male friends who remember me and generally try to get in a dance with me when they see me. I was grateful for dancing at all. When I come alone, I don’t always get in 1/2 of the dances I did on Saturday.

Sometimes I picture that seem from The Cutting Edge (a cheesy partner ice skating movie) where the coach says about the bitch woman, “We should have been making her a singles skater.” I wish I liked more solo dancing styles. I kind of hate that I like partner dancing and thus I have to deal with other people. It doesn’t help that I will probably never get Noah past his innate feeling that dancing is horrible. A long time ago he tried the dance community and discovered that they are all liars. I’m not going to argue with him, not really. Dancers say that they are happy to see new people and dance with them. In practice this is not so much. They want to dance with the good dancers–the ones they see all the time. Their friends. It’s ok. I just wish they wouldn’t lie about it.

I’ve become cautious over the years. I no longer can act like my actions will have no long-term effects. I want to raise my children in this area. I really can’t continue to just act however I please. It has consequences. I’m left in this place where I don’t know how to behave. I’m afraid. I don’t know what I am or am not allowed to be without the consequences for my children being terrible.

Those same two girl-friends ran a 5k with me on Sunday morning. All three of us kept up a nice steady 5 mph pace the entire way without walking at all. I’ve never run that far without walking. It felt really good. Maybe I should pay more attention to pacing, eh? It seems to work fairly well. Normally I mix in sprints randomly and I have to walk after them to get my breath back. This felt really good. I felt like I could run forever.

And there was a handfasting this week. I got to see all the people who chat with me during the day (*wave*) as well as a lot of People I Kind Of Know. Which is to say, people I have seen around in communities for about a decade but I don’t really know them. I’m fairly certain people think I’m snotty but most of the time I don’t talk to people because I’m not interested in being criticized or told I am wrong. I’d really rather stare at the wallpaper, thanks. It feels like I already, long ago, figured out who would tolerate me and I just don’t talk to new people much.

I have to say that Sarah moving in renewed a bunch of tentative distant connections and they have greatly increased in intensity. I finally had a reason to get over the hump with a few people. That’s good. I’m trying.

It’s kind of weird how much time I spend around former lovers when I go out in public. That’s what happens when you fuck your way through every community. It’s harder to deal with them now. Monogamy is… different. I was “monogamous” with Tom. But girls didn’t “count” and he didn’t care about anything shy of a penis in my vagina. That’s not what Noah and I are doing. I’m no longer really supposed to sit on laps and wiggle. Kissing is out. It’s different. It’s a whole different way of thinking about relationships. I feel terribly uncomfortable. For the love of Christ what else do I really have to offer?

That’s the crux. I offer sex because I believe I have nothing else. That I am nothing else. The reality is I don’t have the time or space in my life to be that any more. I consciously chose to stop offering that. To stop being that. I’m left with not knowing what to do. I have been having sex by choice (rather promiscuously) for my entire life. I go out and find it. When I am not looking for sex and I try to deflect it I usually get raped. So I stopped deflecting. Going out in public is terrifying. I don’t know what to do now. It’s hard and scary telling men to desist in doing things that I used to tolerate. They protest–I like it don’t I? That means they should do it. Even though I said “no”. They know more about what I want than I do, right?

Poly gatherings feel like a meat market even when one isn’t at a sex party. There is a lot of frank appraisal in the gaze. People are hunting. They act available. It’s an undercurrent. When people are interested in sex I can tell. I used to feel like those people were looking for someone like me. Now I don’t. I don’t know how to relate to them any more other than to avoid them. There is no good to come of having to point out that they don’t want me. How could that help anything? Just don’t talk to them.

It doesn’t help that I like talking about sex. It’s one of my favorite topics. I know a lot about it and I like broadening what I already know. It makes life awkward. I have consciously sought out knowledge and experiences my whole life. I fell like sex is one of the strongest biological impulses I have and I like thinking about it and talking about it. I like talking about food, too. Why is one shameful and the other isn’t?

I feel like I am badly adjusting to the concept of having a private sex life. That must sound odd to people. Isn’t sex usually private? Well, not for me. Not really. I don’t want anything I do to be a secret. I used to write scene reports and send them in to mailing lists. (I should probably ask Marcie if I can access those archives and find the scene reports. I lost them many hard drives ago.)

I do not yet have a mental picture on what kind of person I will be in ten years. It’s kind of scary. I know that I will still be a lot like me. I hope I will be better. I hope I will have made progress I can feel proud of. Ending a sentence with a preposition is wrong. I want to feel pride in myself. I don’t want to be an asshole. I don’t want to brag. But I want to know that I can look around my life and see frequent signs that I am a competent human being.

Change topics. Food. I didn’t grow up around people who cooked. In my house dinner was taken out of the freezer and unwrapped before it was microwaved. That’s food. Or you just open a bag and eat. Sometimes you have to boil water first and then let the noodles “cook” for three minutes. No shit dude, top ramen was cooking compared to everything else I ate.

When my mom occasionally felt like she should do more it generally involved one step meat in the oven and opening a few cans of vegetables and microwaving them in bowls. No really, we didn’t cook. I don’t understand what that even means until I try to cook for my family. Yesterday was a great day. In the morning I put another trellis in the ground and yanked the blackberry shoots over so that they can start growing how I want. I spent a while trimming the rose bush. I’m not done because that sucker is huge. (Thanks, former housemates!) It’s an ongoing project. Then it started raining and I came in.

I took the bones out of the fridge and made stock. I put a whole bunch of spices and other vegetable remnants in the pot. I had to think really hard about what I was doing. I had to recreate in my head what I have seen other people do. I let that cook for hours. I started making cupcakes. It took me about two hours because the butter was cold and creaming cold butter by hand is kind of a nightmare. I kept covering the bowl and scooting it closer and closer to the simmering stock pot. Melt! Damn you! Eventually it worked out well. The cupcakes are awesome. I know because I ate four last night. I just couldn’t stop. Holy cow those are good. I don’t make cupcakes very often because four in one day seems a bit excessive. But on the first day, oh man. Have to.

Then I had to do a whole bunch of dishes. Then I immediately started the next few steps on making soup. I was in the kitchen processing food and dishes for at least six hours yesterday. To make cupcakes, stock, and soup. I did sit down in the middle and eat lunch. But that’s a full freakin job right there. No fucking wonder my family didn’t cook. They didn’t have that kind of time and energy to spare.

Cooking is so weird. It feels like an act that is either done from desperation because one is poor and can’t do anything else or it is an act of privilege. Only people have had to cook for a very long time. I don’t know why it feels this way. Why does it feel optional? Why does it feel non-mandatory if you can find a way out? I used to eat out a lot. Other people did my cooking. Cooking is low status unless you do ridiculous over the top stuff.

I feel so weird about food. It feels strongly related to class. It doesn’t help that I visit the kinds of playgrounds where people have to agonize for an hour over what they brought. “I know this isn’t good enough for ________ reasons but this other thing I brought is far superior to what that other woman brought. Can you believe she is letting her kids eat __________?” I don’t talk to other moms much. I read my phone or play with the kids. It seems for the best. They don’t want to god damn hear me tell them what I think.

It’s not that I never have those thoughts. I frequently have the thought, “Holy shit, that woman is letting her kid eat what?!” I’m ok with that. I don’t say it out loud where someone can hear me and feel scorned. I suppose that saying it on the internet isn’t really better. Doesn’t that make me two faced as well?

Women talk about that shit at the park so they can shame other women into getting into line. I talk about it because I want to decide what I want to do. Sometimes I think, “Holy shit, that woman is letting her kid eat what?!” and I decide that maybe I’ve been hyperventilating over something I can relax about. I don’t need to shame people into sharing my values. They might have perfectly fucking good reasons for what they are doing. My values tend to be so at odds with everyone around me that I don’t really want to talk about non-involved people. I can’t judge someone I’m not even in a conversation with. I will talk about my opinions with people, sure. I will share what I do and why. But I’m not going to evaluate a stranger and give them some kind of “score” to a third party. I see no benefit.

Today is park day. I’m feeling nervous. It will be fine. I doubt anyone will even know that I told that woman to take a hike. Lots of people show up once and never come back. I don’t think I am going to get into trouble. We’ll see.

Hm. I just had a thought that should be it’s own separate post. I’ll do that.

Learning and shame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parenting, anxiety and me!

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Sometimes I feel like a broken record. My anxiety level for the past couple of days has been unreal. My stomach aches all the time. I feel like I want to vomit fairly regularly. Nothing is going on. My life is smooth, relatively easy, I don’t get a lot of surprises… and yet… here I am. I hate this. I hate that my body is so broken that it is incapable of ramping down my ambient stress level when there isn’t much stress in my life.

I have fairly ruthlessly culled people from my life over the past year and some. I didn’t really do it on purpose but the shape of my days is different than it was a year ago. I don’t talk to as many people. I think I grow ever more isolated. It’s hard but it feels like the right thing. People distract me from the business of my life. I don’t feel good about that. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that wanting people distracts me from the business of my life. If I accept the fact that people are not going to show up and suddenly love me and want to help me I get by.

As always I feel like I don’t explain well. Watching Shanna is how I learn about myself. It’s a slow process. I understand things about myself as I see her doing things. Noah likes to tell me that I picked the high-intensity version of parenting. I feel like an asshole saying that about myself but it is basically true. I am with my kids all the fucking time and when I am with my kids I pour enormous amounts of energy into them.

A friend has an autistic son. I asked her to describe what his therapy looked like because I was curious. I felt kind of weird about the fact that my day-to-day interactions with my kids sounds remarkably like the therapy for autistic children. And I do that for 12+ hours every fucking day. I talk and talk and talk and talk. Shanna is, thank God, a highly verbal kid. So she listens to my explanations and takes them seriously. I can talk her into or out of almost any behavior. I explain in great detail why things are important. Hell, I’m coaching her to require a why so that she feels like she knows why things happen. “If I tell you not to do something and you really want to do it, ask me “Why” and I will explain. Most of the time I have a good reason.” I let my kids destroy the house in the name of creativity day after day. I don’t prevent them from doing things that make my life hard. I try to keep them safe. If it’s not a safety issue I will tell her, “Ok I will feel frustrated if you do that but there is nothing inherently wrong with you doing it so I’m going to leave the room and not watch. Have fun.” Usually I say this when she is about to do something that will cause me to be on my hands and knees for an hour picking something up. It’s going to suck. But I’ll do it because that is my job.

My job is to teach my children how to be functional adults. This is fucking tricky because I’m not sure I qualify every day. Hell, I’m not sure I understand what it means to be a functional adult. I see a wide variety of function out in the world. People get by. What is the base line? Am I shooting for the baseline? Oh god no.

I think a lot about why I want to homeschool. How do I want to do it. Am I doing it because I had a traumatic experience in school and I’m afraid my children will have the same life experiences? They won’t. Full stop. I’ll be frank and say that part of the reason I think about it is because I don’t feel like I am really a fully functional human being as long as I hide at home with my kids. Do we really hide at home? Well, it depends on how you mean it.

I feel like this part of my life seems to be focused on figuring out how my body works so I can turn around and teach my kids how their bodies work. As usual I feel ashamed that I don’t already know. I don’t know because I have spent most of my life dissociated from my body. I don’t know how different movement feels. I’ve never paid enough attention to know. I’ve never moved enough to know. I have hit this weird plateau in running. I can’t go faster for a while. I need to stop trying. When I leave my house hoping for just a few seconds faster I spend the entire run feeling angry at the weakness in my body. I’m at this place where I don’t think I can get much faster without a whole bunch of strength training I’m not really doing.

The pickle is I feel like my entire life works that way right now. Everything I am doing is at this stuck, hard place. What I need to do is just be stronger and everything will be fine. I’m at the stage of gardening where I need to weed like hell. Ugh. It’s not hard for the first hour. After that it hurts. Running isn’t hard for the first fifteen minutes. After that it hurts. Going on walks with the kids is easy for the first 3/4 of every walk. Then it hurts. etc.

It hurts in unexpected ways. Today I stopped at about 2.5 miles in and stretched for several minutes because my back muscles were so horribly tight I felt like they were about to spasm. My skinned knee is still stiff and uncomfortable. Other than that my knees and ankles are doing well so I don’t intend to slow down on the running. But I need to stretch more.

There is nothing in my life I need to do “less” of… other than maybe whining. I could do less whining. But why do I feel like a whiner? I whine at my blog (not even daily) and I do it at random opportunities. It doesn’t happen daily. I feel like I am not allowed to feel like my life is hard because I am sitting on a mountain of privilege and I need to shut the fuck up. So many people have it worse than me. Poor fucking baby. That’s not really a useful attitude to have towards one’s self. (oneself? weird.)

I don’t believe that any of the things I am doing is really all that hard. Hell, even the marathon training doesn’t feel that hard individually. What is hard is that I feel inadequate to the long list of work in my life. I don’t see how I will do it all. I keep hitting this terrible wall of desperately wanting someone to teach me how to do this life thing. Where the fuck is my Mr. Miyagi?! Someone who will just pluck me up and teach me how to survive and work and find discipline? I need help.

That’s nice, dear.

Where is my mommy? Where is the mommy who loves me enough to teach me about life the way I am teaching Shanna and Calli? Why don’t I get that? Well, honestly, it’s because not very many people want to put as much time and attention into another person the way I want to do with my kids. I want my kids to move through the world believing that just about everything has an explanation and if they want to know it we can bloody well figure out what it is. That doesn’t happen in school. In school the reason you have to do something is because some arbitrary asshole somewhere made a draconian rule. Bowing to random arbitrary rules isn’t very functional, in my opinion. In my opinion being functional means staying your course and figuring out how to survive in a terribly rigged system. Not a god damn person in the public education system tried to do anything to help me. I’m an outlier, fine. People can tell me hundreds of stories of them having good experiences. Research says that outliers do not do well in our system. Is there any chance in the whole god damn world that my kids won’t be outliers?

It is an Adverse Childhood Experience growing up with a parent who has diagnosed mental illness. Hi. I’m Krissy. During my life I have been “officially” diagnosed with PTSD, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Major and Minor Depression, Bipolar Disorder, and lots of people have unofficially thrown out a variety of other options for various reasons at various times. My kids are going to grow up with that. I can’t prevent that. I can’t not exist in their lives so they can benefit from not being around a crazy person. That feels bad to say, but it is a fact. My kids wouldn’t be able to go to school and be just like everyone else and fit in and progress at the normal rate in the normal manner. They would always have the horrible reality of coming home to me. I would be highly disruptive to a child who was genuinely normal. I’m not good at that type of existence.

Stupid shit. A friend posted pictures of bringing in goody bags and cupcakes to the classroom for her daughter’s birthday. I would be shittier than shit about stuff like that. I wouldn’t want to spend the money. I would resent putting forth effort to do “expected” things and I would be inconsistent and pissy about it. I wouldn’t encourage my kids to dress normally. I wouldn’t encourage my kids to behave in ways that worked in the classroom. When Shanna says, “Shit. My glass is empty. That sucks.” I just smile and don’t worry about it. When she says “fuck” I completely ignore it in the moment. Later I work into the conversation how some people dislike certain words for totally illogical reasons. If you want those people to like you then you have to play their game. I’m not going to tell my daughter these words are bad because I don’t believe it is true. I believe it is an irrelevant distinction. I think they are impolite in some circumstances just because it is good to treat people how they want to be treated. It is important to me to handle it that way.

My kids will have a profoundly different understanding of the world than most kids because I removed the explicitly sexual content from my view of the world and have otherwise just merged them with my experience. To me that is what life is. You take your children with you for your life. Shanna has some interesting things to say about the police given her experiences participating in the Occupy movement. She was upset about not going to the General Strike yesterday but Calli wasn’t feeling well. Sick kids trump politics in this family.

That is what I am specifically teaching to my kids. Life is about this weird slightly moving hierarchy of importance of needs. You have to triage and decide your priorities over and over and over again. If you don’t think about your life that way you won’t really be able to make long-term planning decisions.

Right now we are trying to find balance on budgeting stuff, money is hard and complicated. I’m trying to figure out how to divide the hours of the day. How much time do I spend on different tasks around the house? The thing is, I’m doing the high intensity version of parenting. I do tasks around the willingness and ability of my kids to handle me working. That makes everything complicated. I’m juggling their attention needs, my need for time when I am not being pestered with 20+ questions every minute, the need to constantly be in the fucking kitchen cooking and cleaning up after the mess, and everything else I want to do in this life: writing, running, gardening, have friends. I keep reminding myself that my children won’t be small forever. I’m crossing my fingers that this ridiculous outpouring of energy will eventually slow down. I have no way of knowing. I can’t plan as if it will. I have to plan as if I am going to be this tired and interrupted forever. That way every improvement will be a blessing and a wonderful gift instead of something grudgingly grasped.

I really struggle with this whole “mental illness” thing. I have a lot of days where my body is in active fight or flight mode for a lot of the day. It is very hard to calm it down. I have terrible ranges of emotions. But I’m at work so I stomp the shit out of most of it. Producing people who can function within society is my goal. That means I can’t cause them to develop the same kind of extreme coping mechanisms. I just can’t. How can I teach something I have never experienced? How can I teach what it is like to move through the world without fear? I feel so much fear I want to vomit sometimes. And nothing bad is happening to me. I think that part of the reason that I have so many friends on the autistic spectrum is because I know my emotions are too extreme for the normal range so I need to hang out with people who just won’t notice or care. Honestly hanging out with my kids is similar. Well, my kids notice. But they give me a kiss and a hug and smile and expect everything to be all better now. As far as they are concerned, it is. Because mommy smiles and hugs them and says, “I am so glad I get to spend my life with you.” They do make me feel better. I had this whole range of emotions before I had kids. Before them I had sex with random people or did drugs or cut to deal with my emotions. Now we are trying to move in the “hugs not drugs” direction. The pot is so complicated. I have, uhm, tried a wide variety of street drugs. The pot is different in how it functions in my life.

What is the difference between drug addiction that is bad and being dependent on a medication for survival? Many diabetics require insulin. Thyroid medication is a big deal. Etc. My brain was damaged by what happened to me as a child. It does not function normally. I feel genuine terror and have the full body experience of being retraumatized some days. It really sucks ass. But I can take that sensation away and relax enough to have a conversation with my kids and be mellow. I feel disgusting for needing help. Why the fuck can’t I just be stronger? Such a fucking loser.

Noah told me last night that he can tell I have been feeling unworthy lately. I’ve been struggling with finding a place in my head and my heart where I am comfortable with who I am and what I am doing with my life. In a variety of different places in the past couple of weeks I keep finding stupid things that all remind me that I don’t have a lot of earning potential. My credential has lapsed. I would have to go back to college before I could usefully work in my field again. I think I would rather eat manure. I feel like I am a bad partner to Noah. I feel like he is giving up too much in being with me. I feel like a failure because I can’t figure out how to settle into the traces and just be happy with my life. I can’t figure out how to stop having panic attacks. I can’t figure out how to be calm and mellow. I don’t know how to be happy. I only know how to be scared and afraid and lonely and angry. What fucking good am I? How functional am I? This is what I don’t understand.

I feel defensive and guilty because I want to keep my kids out of school and I don’t want to try to be a “working” parent. It is stupid and ridiculous. No one who knows me is campaigning against me. I am only arguing with voices in my head. Part of the problem is I have this growing horror as I acknowledge that I am going to have to explain to Shanna that a lot of the ways in which I interact with her will get her into trouble out in the world. People don’t like bossy know-it-alls who narrate what is happening in life. They think it is weird. It makes people uncomfortable. They don’t want to hear that. And people get really upset if they think they are having a “private” conversation (loudly, in public) and someone comments. I have never understood why. I’m a sit-in-the-diner-and-talk-to-each-table sort of person. My older daughter is like me only she doesn’t have any brain damage. She loves talking to people and she feels safe and comfortable in the world. So she has virtually no fear. Watching her makes me feel like I am living a good life. I don’t want to miss even five minutes of the Shanna Show. Unfortunately it’s hard to find balance.

Calli is so different. She is not @#$#@ interested in having me narrate for her the way I do for Shanna. She hits me when I try. This is going to be an interesting journey. I am startled by the things she manages to figure out by herself. This is going to be an interesting journey. Shanna thrives on hands-on directed learning. Calli wants to watch and then figure it out on her own. I’m surprised by the physical dexterity she exhibits. She is trying to keep up with Shanna and she is fearless in her attempts. She lands safely more than she falls so she keeps trying to do things that should be far beyond her development. I think I was quieter when Shanna was this age but I can’t remember. The words blur. I think I was a lot quieter. I was a lot more lost in my thoughts. That is the hardest part about this job. I don’t have a chance to think very often. I have to carve out deliberate silence in my life. I crave it. I need it. The constant talking is hard because it requires so much thinking. She makes a lot of conversational leaps that are hard to follow unless you know her whole little set of life experiences and she needs a lot of repeating of everything. Our daily conversational life does literally look like therapy for autism. I don’t set specific developmental goals, I just conversationally speak that way about pretty much everything. If I introduce a weird or new word I will emphasize it and break in the conversation to explain what it means and use it several times in several ways so that it sticks better in Shanna’s head.

It is really weird for me to sit and think really hard about what my life is going to be like in twenty years. What am going to do when my baby is twenty two? What will I do with all this energy? I’m kind of scared. I have no idea what the future will look like. I have no idea if I will ever get to the point where I stop vibrating with fear all day long for no reason at all other than bad things happened a long long time ago. I think being afraid I will always feel this way is making it exponentially worse. I don’t know how to just accept the feelings and deal with them when they come up and wait them out. I have no trust that they will end. They never have. Well, they pause. I don’t always always feel this way. It’s so complicated.

And I don’t even have time to get into sex. I have so much thinking to do about that. And it’s largely being evaded. I don’t think about sex when I am with my kids. That doesn’t leave me a lot of time to think about it. This shit is complicated.

Always with the defensive, this girl.

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Yesterday was one of those magical running days. The kind where the beat of the music and my grief match up perfectly. It’s hard to describe what I enjoy about running. There are several stretches of blocks in my neighborhood that I use for sprinting. The lines on the sidewalk just require it. When I get to those specific streets I pray for the right fast song. I run until I can barely breathe. I run until I am gasping out sobs and I can barely see anymore because I am crying so hard. There is so very much to cry about.

I have so much grief. I feel like I will never stop grieving. I will never feel like I can move past these feelings. I’m trying to trust the process. I’m trying to believe that even though this cycle of mourning isn’t over it will end some day. I just don’t know when. It’s hard to keep going.

Why was I crying yesterday? It’s hard to remember specifics because I cover so many topics in my head. I spent a lot of time thinking about why I am the sort of person to send nasty judgmental shaming letters to. I get them every so often. I trigger the shit out of people. It’s the same reason my former therapist fired me. I don’t do things how other people think they should be done. In the process I am deeply distressing. People don’t like feeling distressed by how “off from the norm” I am. They want me to fall back in line, damnit. I should do _________ in order to be acceptable to them. I can’t.

I can’t ever be acceptable to everyone in my life. That isn’t an option open to me. I will always bother people in some way on some level. Pretty much everyone. I will always talk about subjects that make you uncomfortable, no matter who you are. I will search for that topic that bothers you the most and then I will harp on it constantly. I do this on an unconscious level. I default to challenging people. A lot of the time I’m not doing it on purpose. I believe with every part of me that I would not have survived if I was willing to let other people set the terms of my reality. I would have crumbled a long time ago. I would have to believe that I was who they say I am.

This time I would have to believe I am an addict. I am bad. I am helpless before these things that control me. My cutting, anger, drug use, and sexual activity are bad. I am bad for being addicted to these things. Bad. Bad. Bad. I know. I’ve always known. I know that you think I am bad. That doesn’t mean that you are right or that I have to agree. That’s an opinion not a provable set of facts. I’m obsessive (even though I hear this kind of pedantry means you lose the argument I am going to do this anyway because it is my fucking blog and I’m only arguing with myself which means there is no such thing as losing) so here’s a definition for you:

Addiction is defined as the continued use of a mood altering substance or behaviour despite adverse consequences.[1] This can include, but is not limited to, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, exercise abuse, and gambling. Some defining characteristics of addiction include: impaired control over subtances/behaviour, preoccupation with substance/behaviour, continued use despite consequences, and denial.[2] Habits and patterns associated with addiction are typically characterized by immediate gratification (short-term reward), coupled with delayed deleterious effects (long-term costs).[3]Physiological dependence occurs when the body has to adjust to the substance by incorporating the substance into its ‘normal’ functioning.[4] This state creates the conditions of tolerance, and withdrawal. Tolerance is the process by which the body continually adapts to the substance and requires increasingly larger amounts to achieve the original effects. Withdrawal refers to physical and psychological symptoms people experience when reducing or discontinuing a substance the body had become dependent on. Symptoms of withdrawal generally include but are not limited to anxiety, irritability, intense cravings for the substance, nausea, hallucinations, headaches, cold sweats, and tremors.

That’s from Wikipedia. I use marijuana under medical supervision to deal with psychological issues. Yes there are technically adverse side effects because smoking is bad for your lungs. Overall it makes my life so much better it isn’t funny. I repeat that it has fewer side effects than any other drug I could be on.

Cutting, sex, and anger are all in a hand wavey category. I have a problem with the 12 step language of weakness. “I’m not responsible. A higher power has to save me.”  Well… I am certainly addicted to harming myself. I do it in a variety of ways. I don’t give any particular method much higher billing than any other. I think that is what he really meant by saying I am addicted to these things. But of course he’s blowing hot air out of his ass so he doesn’t quite see the pattern. I go through long periods without cutting. I have gone many years between periods where I feel bad enough about myself to need that release. I can easily channel that frustration and rage into other areas if given the slightest chance.

Cutting works to put an end to bad emotional states that would otherwise lead to suicide. Is it a great approach? No. It isn’t. But for an awful lot of my life I didn’t have a better choice and I think that cutting was significantly better for me than suicide. No one is going to take that belief away from me. I had to cope. I managed. I survived. The last time I cut I had kind of an epiphany that it wasn’t working any more. I threw away my scalpels. I have moved beyond the utility of that as a coping method. I didn’t stop because someone shamed me or told me I was bad for doing it. That kind of response is only likely to cause me to go do it more and more and more. I stopped because I realized it was insanity to continue. Insanity in the sense that it doesn’t make sense to keep doing the same activity and expecting a different response.

I no longer have a life where I need a physical outlet for my emotional pain. Thank you, Noah. Thank you for being my bulwark against the dark. Thank you for providing me with a safe place to live for the rest of my life. Thank you for supporting me so that I can do work I am better suited for and I don’t have to go out and “get a job” to prove I have worth.

The emotional pain I feel now I can talk about and find solutions for. I think the only place where the language of addiction is particularly useful for me is where it talks about the diminishing returns issue. Or if you talk about the cost being too high for the benefit.

I asked Noah for monogamy partially as a way of providing myself an ‘out’ on dealing with a lot of my problematic behavior. I’m not good at self-regulation when it comes to sex. Now I am safe. Now I will always be able to say, “I’m in a monogamous marriage; I can’t have sex with you” instead of having to be able to say “I don’t want to.”  Saying I don’t want to have sex with someone is hard. I feel unworthy of doing so. I feel like if someone is suffering for lack of sex it is my job to fix it. I can be a sacred whore, that’s fine–but I must be a whore. I don’t say no very well. I am going to hide behind monogamy and be grateful for it. I feel guilty that I am dragging Noah behind me kicking and screaming into this change. I feel like I am unfairly punishing him for a problem he doesn’t have. But I asked and he agreed and he doesn’t really want to talk about whether it is fair or not. It is. Move on.

I cried yesterday because I feel terribly bad that in order to protect myself from my own impulsive behavior I have curtailed Noah. It seems selfish and immature and just flat mean. I am such a bitch. And I’m trying to learn how to tell him “no” in general. I no longer close my eyes and go away and let him have sex with me. It’s hard. It’s hard to feel like I am not breaking rules. It is hard because I feel like I am bad for not giving him release when and how he wants it. I am not holding up my end of the deal. He is supporting me–don’t I owe him?  I told him that thirty years of being a whore is enough for anyone. It’s time to retire.

Noah isn’t attacking me. Noah doesn’t require that I put out because he wants me to. I project that onto him. I fear that belief. I have it. That’s enough.

Am I an addict? Maybe? Yes? It seems to be an irrelevant question.  Unless you believe that someone who takes thyroid medication is also an addict it is simply a innate bias to say that the pot is a problem. It’s not your preferred kind of medication but I’m a hippy and my doctor agrees that it is good for me. Imagine me sticking my tongue out at you. I also see a massage therapist and an acupuncturist (ok, not since pregnancy but I will get back there some day–I believe in the benefits). I think I should see a chiropractor about something going on in the lower right hand side of my back. That has been a problem since Jeremy sodomized me when I was like ten. I have never been able to get it to stop hurting. Running is teaching me a lot about my body. I think I have a better idea of how to deal with the pain.

So! Am I an addict when it comes to pot? Wikipedia says no. I’m going to go with that. Sex? Well… obviously I’m doing as much “recovery” from that as I can do. I am not actually interested in celibacy and trying to be celibate just because someone else might think I should be would result in me not being married any more. Noah wouldn’t tolerate that. He’s dealing with me saying “no” a lot and he’s dealing with not being allowed to have sex with other people. I think he’s a god damned stand up guy. No more can or should be asked of our marriage as I’m figuring out this shit with my relationship to sex. So am I addicted to sex? Maybe? But it doesn’t matter because I’ve figured out how I can have a healthy relationship with it and I’m moving forward. Kind of a useless thing to sit around and go to meetings on at this point. Just sayin’.

I haven’t cut in nearly a year and I no longer have my favored cutting tool. I could some day acquire another one, sure. I don’t think I will though. I don’t want that modeled for my children as an option of coping mechanisms.

It’s interesting to me how this evolution has happened. I cut for many years. When I stopped cutting my body as a teenager I started cutting my hair. It got shorter and shorter till I shaved it when I was seventeen. My mother was so angry with me it wasn’t funny. I felt like the whole world was radiating anger with me for cutting my hair. I was told constantly how ugly I was and how unflattering my “new look” was.

It’s been very weird and uncomfortable that people keep gushing about how good I look with a shaved head/short hair this time. It makes me cry. Because when they say it I hear my mother ranting in my head and I want to hit them and cry that they are lying to me. I feel rage that this person is lying about finding me attractive this way. I try to not do more than clench my fists. I try to not stomp away. I smile. I say thank you. I think that I flinch sometimes and then people simply become more emphatic. Noah certainly tells me that he likes it often. That is one of the things I cried about yesterday. “Hair” was on.

I wonder if my family hated this as a hair cut because of how intense it makes me look. I feel like I have to plaster a fake smile on my face all of the time or I look like I might punch you in the face as soon as say “hello”. It’s weird. I feel like the effects of aging are doing interesting things to my face. I am going to wrinkle like fuck. All the women in my family have deep lines of care from a fairly young age. We live hard lives and it shows. I look at my hands and I see my mothers hands. I see the rope appearing. My hands are the hands of someone who does manual labor. Well, I don’t have deep callouses yet. But I will as soon as I get up the energy to do more gardening. I would have done anything to prevent aging the way I am if I had stayed in a relationship with Tom.

One of the things I cry about when I run is thinking about how resentful Tom would be of the changes in me. It’s strange. I cry because I loved him so much and he wanted such a small piece of who I am. I feel bad that after my family he felt so very good to me but we didn’t know how to be real people together. Tom lives in a world where “pretty” and “sexy” are such a high bar that they become a vocation. I’m naturally pretty lazy. I don’t think I am that pretty and I don’t see much point in dressing up a plow horse to take it to town. I know I am attractive but it’s different. As I age it becomes more dramatic to me. I am intense in a way that precludes pretty. Pretty is about unoffensive and I will never be that. My perception of the world Tom lives in is honestly kind of bleak. I would not be happy in it. I can’t stay dedicated to something I feel like I will never actually attain. It involves a lot of specific activity and specific idleness that I just don’t want. I think back over how I lived my life and I feel glad that I made most of the choices I made. I was always running.

A boyfriend from high school sent me a congratulatory message about the half marathon and sent me a link to a marathon training program that is way more awesome than what I had been doing. By which I mean I am so grateful that this program wants me doing two miles for the first few weeks because it feels like such a wave of relief I can barely stand it.  Doing only two miles for the last two days of running has meant I have practiced sprinting. It uses different muscle groups and it feels good to stretch my legs once in a while.

I lost my train of thought a while ago because my cat jumped on the keyboard and then I got mad at her. We had to pause and have a negotiation wherein she glared at me and looked sad that I had thrown her the floor. I sighed deeply and went and got a blanket to prevent her from drawing blood and I moved my computer so she could lay on my lap. Puff’s mother gave her to me when Puff was only a few days old. Her eyes were still closed and I bottle fed her to keep her alive. Puff’s mother brought us the babies to save them from a rain storm that would have drowned them outside. The feral mama wasn’t willing to come inside and care for the babies and she didn’t want anything to do with them later, but she did save them. That feels important. I have had Puff for fourteen years. My niece named her. T said, “She looks like a puff of clouds.” She is white with grey nearly-Siamese markings. For a couple of years after Shanna was born Puff avoided me. I feel like our relationship has deepened a lot over the last year or so. She doesn’t mind Calli the way she minds Shanna. She loves that I sit in the garage alone. I attribute a lot of our relationship growth to the smoking, actually. It keeps me away from the kids and she is quick to remind me that our alone time should be special, darn it!

I feel the need to apologize for my many typos. I stop writing when I am abruptly pulled away to do something else and I really don’t have time to edit. I’m not a professional writer so it feels ok to be sloppy.

The half-marathon.

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Three hours and eight minutes. I only went over three hours because I had to stop and wait in a huge line for a bathroom break.  That took quite a while, it was ridiculous. I did not enjoy yesterday. It was definitely one of my shittiest running days ever. I felt like I was at the wall the whole time. My body just felt off the whole time. I felt sad and lonely. I resented the hell out of the fact that most people (that’s pretty much a lie, but I’m going to ignore reality for a bit) were in groups and had supporters. I felt isolated and alone. I don’t feel alone when I go running most of the time. I feel like I am running and no one in my life can do that with me so ok, I happen to be alone right now. Thank god I don’t have to listen to their chatter.

When I am running in a big group of people it feels different. I feel like there is a glass wall between me and other people. I feel like they are on the other side, where people are loved and supported. Then there is me. Alone. Again. It’s really idiotic and self absorbed. There were a lot of other people there alone. A few of them talked to me!

My feelings seem out of place with my reality. Ok, I was alone at the race. I felt sad that no one came to watch me run. I mean, dude. It was in Oakland. It’s not like it is inconvenient to a large percentage of people I know. Someone could have. It’s always complicated, you know? Yesterday I felt like this running thing is a bad idea.

I like how I feel when I run by myself. When I run by myself I feel like I’m not trying to compete with anyone else. I’m just doing my thing. When I run with other people I see how our paces match up and as I drop back and back and back in the crowd… that makes me feel lame. Then I start feeling shame. This is pretty ridiculous. I have been running for less than four months. I don’t need to feel bad that I am not a better runner. It would not be particularly good for my body to try and insist that I be a faster runner right now.

I think I want to run the marathon because I am hoping I get to see my brother one more time. I’m not going to continue training so I can do it again. I saw my mother and my sister and my nephew and my aunt and my cousins once more before I broke ties. I haven’t seen Jimmy in a long time. I know that he looks like my father. I feel like I am already losing the picture in my mind that I have of what that part of my family looks like. I feel unspeakably sad. I feel like there is a weight on my chest. I’m still grieving.

I’m told that grief is kept in your lungs. Shallow breaths keep the grief inside you. Running certainly makes me breathe more deeply. I cried as I ran. I missed my family and I longed for them so much it hurt. My family is the kind of family that is intensely good and intensely bad. I miss the good. I can’t stay because of the bad. I’m really struggling with continuing to believe it is the right decision. I feel so much guilt. I feel so bad that I am keeping my kids away from my family. My mother lives in downtown San Jose. And she has never seen Calli. I feel so bad. I am a terrible person who is hurting my mother.

And I thought about that as I ran past all the cheering people on the sidelines. They were there to support someone they loved. I have driven off the people who would do that for me. And then I have a pity party about it. How pathetic. So I cried a lot while I ran. It was a very hard run.

I felt weird because I didn’t see anyone else eat. I start eating between mile three and four. I take two or three handfuls of trail mix every other mile after that. I run hanging on to my little baggy. Sometimes I feel lazy and I put it in my pocket for a while. In the race environment I felt like the country bumpkin come to town and I’m doing it all wrong. I don’t have sleek running gear. I’m not sure I’ve ever been that close to so much spandex in my life. And I ran in a cotton sweatshirt. I was given a lot of funny looks.  What? It’s what I own. Everyone else was advertising a cause or showing off former marathon shirts. This is also, not true; I wasn’t “the only one” but there really did seem to be a uniform and we were weird. Those of us who weren’t wearing the uniform were quite odd. Oh, and then there were the ladies who ran in tulle skirts. They were cute.

I feel weird running next to people for long periods and not talking to them. It feels awkward and uncomfortable. It feels like a lot of pressure to come up with something to talk about. If I don’t I feel gauche. And that distracted me from running, and them. I think that it is because people train at different paces. When you are in the group of people who are collectively running around fourteen minute miles that means there is a lot of walking. But people mix in their walking in different ways. It also felt like some people ran at a slow jog without really having to pause to walk. But they never went very fast. I’m a very impulsive runner. I run at the speed of the song on my headset. I have a lot of slow songs on purpose so I don’t try to sprint forever, but I do sprint. Mostly the songs are the latest albums from Lady Gaga, Adele, and Katy Perry with a few older songs I like mixed in. It’s a whole bunch of songs that cause me to sit and think about different relationships in my life. I like how I wander through different topics as time goes on. I’m not stuck thinking about the same person in the same way every time I hear any particular song.  It’s a slow journey through different situations.

If I try to run without the music I can’t do it. I can only kind of stumble along. I don’t have anything telling my body it is time to move. I don’t want to run. Not really. I rather hate how it feels some days.  But I don’t have another way of seeing Jimmy. I don’t really care if that is pathetic. I’m not magnanimous. I’m not sure that is a healthy reason. I need to see what Jimmy looks like. It won’t be true, but I will reconstruct a memory for myself of my father. It will be the only picture I will have.

I’ve been watching more movies than usual and recently I heard the line, “You never stop needing your parents.” As I was running part of the reason I was crying was because I realized how far ahead of me Jimmy will be. I realized he will probably leave the race grounds long before I finish. Unless I spot him in the vast zoo of five thousand people right before the race I don’t really have a chance of seeing him. And I will spend that whole race hoping to see him at the finish line. I’m going to cry a lot. I kind of wonder why I do this to myself.

Why does every activity have to be viewed in the most self harming way possible? Why do I always have to have a tale of loss and woe? When will something I am doing be about something, anything other than grieving? My therapist, God bless her, heard that line and looked straight at me and told me that I will never stop grieving. When you were hurt like I was as a child you never stop feeling pain for very long. It feels like a cross between a harsh sentence and great comfort.

I don’t perceive reality very well. I feel isolated and alone when I stand near people. The fact that people are apathetic towards me hurts my feelings because I feel constantly reminded of the apathy I experienced as a child. It caused me a lot of damage when I was a child. The fact that people are apathetic towards me makes me not want to stand physically close to them. Running through the crowd was occasionally terrifying. I don’t like being near large crowds. I consider them dangerous and I’m not even sure why. I feel like I could all of a sudden have some need and people would run past and not care and I would feel devastated. The impending loss of trust feels overwhelming. Like if I fell and was injured. I feel like people wouldn’t stop for me. I feel like this mass movement of uniformed lemmings all run in pursuit of a time goal and that is what they are there for and please get out of the way. It’s not even slightly true. I look around at people and judge faces and there were a lot of people who looked like they would probably be the sort who stop. For someone else. Someone who deserved help. It’s not that I think that other people are deficient in being willing to help good people. It’s that I think I am the kind of person you step around on the side walk because of course this loser is on the ground again.

I don’t know how to change this feeling that I am a terrible person who does not deserve any human compassion and people are going to know that and treat me accordingly. I don’t know how to stop feeling dirty.

I’m glad I get to look forward to six months of running by myself. I need the time alone again to apologize to my knee for running according to trying to keep up with people. I wasn’t listening properly and that was rude. We’ll work it out. I need to figure out how to stop trying to run with anyone else. How do I have blinders on and ignore the people around me. I was seriously spooked by the crowd. I spent a lot of time looking at the spectators and feeling sad that I never saw people I knew. At least I won’t have that distraction in Long Beach. I will be just running to the finish line. I know the spectators aren’t for me and I can ignore them more comfortably.

I’m still not sure how to deal with pacing off of other people. That didn’t work out. And I think I should look up what “interval training” is. People kept asking me about it. I don’t understand why. Google is so cool. Hm. Five minutes on Google tells me I don’t think I will ever answer those questions. That’s not a kind of runner I want to be. Excellent!

I feel like I am feeling like I must run a fast marathon and I shouldn’t have that as a goal. If it takes me six hours that is ok. If I seriously feel compelled to go too fast I will hurt myself. I’ve never run long distances before. I don’t want to injure myself and prevent going to the race. That would be stupid. And I don’t want to find out about how much help my fellow runners would be willing to provide if I injure myself at the race. Both of those sound like Bad Plans.

It’s hard to actually stay on my pace but I need to learn how to do it. That is a lot of what I learned from this race. I am too distractible. I need to not feel hurt by the apathy around me. People aren’t mean, they are concentrating. I should be concentrating too. I did start singing along by mile ten. People smiled at me. It’s a lot of how I measure my running speed–how well I can sing along. I measure my heart and lung workload that way. I don’t have a good silent method. I suppose I have six months to practice, if I want. Or I can just sing along and let people smile. It’s not like I’m doing something terrible. I’m not singing loudly.

Time to stop whining and go inside.

Race day

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I’m going to leave my house in about an hour to go run the half marathon. It’s raining like mad. I can’t shake feeling sad. My neck hurts. My head hurts. My heart hurts.

Maybe I shouldn’t be running to prove something to someone, but I am. I’m always trying to prove something. I’m always trying to prove I am worth something. Sometimes I fail. But I’m always always hoping I’m good enough.

Broken promises

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My mom likes to make promises she can’t keep.  Oh she always intends to do it when she says it.  She just isn’t very good at taking stock of what things are realistic and possible in life.  And she rarely has the willpower to deny herself something in favor of a later pay off.  It’s all stupid shit, right?  She promised she would take me to Magic Mountain every year from when I was eight on.  My siblings grew up with season passes and I heard the stories and I felt envious.  I went by myself when I was twenty-one.

One of the talents my mom has is sewing.  She’s a fairly talented seamstress.  I still have things she made from me and I wear them when I get the chance.  I have a Snow White costume and an Ariel (from The Little Mermaid) dress–you know the one when she comes down to dinner and brushes her hair with a fork?  That one.  My dress is awesome.  And my mommy made it for me which makes it extra special.  She made my Dickens costume.  I wish she hadn’t told me to buy the pattern and material for three separate Dickens costumes because then in the long run I feel bitter that (as usual) she doesn’t follow through completely on what she says.  I should just be grateful she did one.  Usually she doesn’t get through one.

I focus on the fact that in everything she said to me there was always a lie.  I always had to be careful not to get my hopes up when she said anything.  I would say I had less than a 50/50 chance of her following through.  That wears on you decade after decade.  I wish she had promised less.

“I’ll pick you up from school” was one of those ones I wish she had promised less of.  I would not be able to add up all the hours I sat around waiting to be picked up.  I understand.  She always had a reason.  It’s not her fault.  Ever.  It is always someone or something else’s fault.  Always.  Always.  Always.

I hold the people in my life to a higher standard of truth telling because of this.  Approximations are not good things.  Over-promising is the worst thing you can possibly do.  I try very hard to keep my expectations and hopes very low.  Too many people are fucking liars who are too self absorbed to even admit to themselves that what they are doing is lying.

There are sins I forgive easily and barely notice; there are sins that cause me to feel like I have to smite someone from the earth because they are hurting me.  The real solution isn’t to smite anyone.  I’m terrified that the solution is simply to never trust a word that people say unless they prove over years that they aren’t a liar.  Unfortunately I tend to trust more than I should.  I get lied to a lot.  Oh of course it is never a lie it’s just that people don’t think they need to have a lot of integrity in what they say.  They feel no need to be impeccable with their words.  Close enough is good enough.  And I die of a thousand paper cuts.

I don’t want my children to have this hostility and rigidness around promises.  I know it isn’t healthy.  It is isolating.  I certainly can’t hang out with people much.  I’m trying to figure out how much I can handle really having steadily in my life.  I want there to be a predictable pattern.  I want to have a pattern, damnit.  I’m really struggling because nothing else in the world wants me to.  Stupid life just keeps happening.  I really do want to see people and so far that has to be a flexible thing.

It is hard to be this lonely and angry at the same time.  I know that I have to be careful not to get too angry when other people are around.  I manage this with the kids by not talking at all.  It’s hard to do that with adult visitors.  Then they become discomfited and I have to try to knock it off.  I can see the visible discomfort spread over people and I feel a wash of shame.  Yup.  That’s me.  The angry one.  Then I feel so much self loathing that I am always the angry one that I just feel more anger.  I’ve been told a lot of times that feeling that angry around people is basically abusive.  I’m a monster no matter what.  I just am.  It doesn’t matter what I do.

Ok, I kicked the cabinet door off the wall.  I suppose that is something terrible and horrible.  Because more shame really makes everything better.

I have had trouble running since the grief ritual.  I feel so overwhelmed with anger that I can barely see straight and it makes me stumble so I am running more slowly and carefully.  I don’t want to injure myself; I truly don’t.  I don’t want running to become my latest method of self-injury.  I want to find joy in my body.  It’s hard to do in the dark and cold.  I miss the afternoons.

I feel stuck in this anger.  I am so frustrated and anxious.  I need to go proofread six more chapters back from my editor and that’s scaring the crap out of me.  I am so tired of reading this story.  I want to avoid it and I want to get this done and over with.

When I say I follow the scorched earth path I mean that I will forever say anything I want about someone and shun that person from my life.  I will be as harsh as I feel the need to be.  I can be a very harsh person.  It is obvious when I am truly done.

I am struggling with some things in my close personal relationships.  I don’t want to regret the things I write, ever.  I want to always know that I am writing a truth I feel comfortable standing behind.   Right now I am having a lot of very strong irrational emotions.  I don’t know how to deal with them.  I am already saying things that are impossible to take back.  Dear sweet Jesus at least I will keep them off of my blog.  I’m struggling.

How can I talk about what I am experiencing without giving any information or judgment.  hm.

I feel unappreciated and used.  I feel like I am getting the realistic version of an impossible situation.  I feel tightness in my throat.  My neck aches.  My shoulders ache.  My lower back aches and I can feel how bad my posture is right now.  All right, I made a few chair adjustments and that is slightly better.  I feel empty and drained.  I feel abandoned and untrusting.  I feel exhausted in a way that isn’t going away with more sleep.

Recently I heard someone describe it as being “pregnant” with her book and I kind of feel like that.  I’m getting a lot of harsh physical symptoms and emotionally I feel like I am living on the memory of fumes because I ran out of gas long ago.  I am at a time and place in my life where I feel like I need an endless stream of support but I am too ashamed to ask for it.  I don’t have a family and people like me have to just figure it the fuck out because we are too unpleasant to be around.  I feel so pathetic and needy.  I feel so very lonely.  But I don’t feel like I get to talk about that because it is my own damn fault that I am so fucking unpleasant to be around and that’s why I am alone.

Sometimes I wonder what it is like to be part of an extended family.  Thinking about it makes me cry.  What would it be like to have people who know me and want to spend time with me?  I have friends, yes.  But my friends go see their families on holidays.  I notice.  I tend to feel like it isn’t possible for me to stop being angry so I should stop attempting to spend time with people at all because no one should have to deal with my fucking mouth.

It’s probably a good thing I see my therapist tonight.

Running and singing and whining and kids.

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When I sing I listen to my ‘healing’ playlist.  Mostly women.  Mostly at least semi-introspective music.  Lots of relationship stuff.  Lots of anger and lots of sadness.  There are happy songs too.  One of the main reasons I don’t think I run very fast is because I can still sing along sorta pretty much the whole time.  I pant the words out during sprints.  Just like labor, I never lose the ability to talk.  I keep hearing about how something doesn’t qualify as heavy exercise unless you lose the ability to talk.  I hear that serious labor inhibits the ability to talk.  I never lost my ability to communicate.  I don’t get silent.

I used to.  I used to experience everything scary or hard or painful as something that caused me to withdraw.  Now the harder something is the louder I want to be while doing it.  I just can’t suffer in silence any more.  This means that my neighbors look at me funny while I run around singing fairly loudly.  I smile and wave.  I decided that if I am going to run in a Cheshire Cat hat complete with ears I am required to be cheerful.  People stare at me a lot.  If I take the hat off and run with the super short hair they stare just as much.  Early in the running I felt kind of defensive and weird.  I doubt my facial expression was cheerful.  People used to look at me warily.  Now I run along singing, at about a normal conversation volume, and I smile and wave and interrupt myself to yell, “Hello!  Nice night, isn’t it?”  Then I go back to singing loudly.  Now people laugh and wave and answer me with some appropriate comment.

I think people dislike me because I project hostility so much of the time.  Mostly people don’t have an opinion of me.  But I’m a polarizing figure!  Whatever.  Mostly people don’t have an opinion of me.  They don’t care enough to have an opinion.

I’m not sure I can actually wrap my head around that.

Yeah, no.  Can’t do it.  I have an opinion about everything and everyone.  Only I don’t actually.  I think I’m lying again.  I’m sitting here trying to force myself to have neutral thoughts.  It’s more difficult than one might think.  If I look around my garage I can think that I don’t have an opinion on the quality of most of the books (I share library space with people who have a lot of books I haven’t read) but I have an opinion on how much room they take up and where they are stored.  Is it a neutral impression?  Well… if I see the book dropped somewhere else I will have very strong negative opinion about the book.  So I think that all of them are just on the negative side of neutral for me which means I have an opinion.

Yeah.  I don’t think I can imagine what it is like to go through the world with actual apathy.  Do you want to know the problem?  The problem is that I have this weird little piece of me in the center and it decides if my opinions are positive or negative today.  Pretty much across the board.  Today I’m feeling hostile and pissy; I don’t even know why.  I could come up with candidates, but they aren’t really big enough.  I have too much good coming.  I should be excited.  At this time tomorrow I will be on an airport shuttle with Noah and we get three full days of no kids.

The running is hard.  I’m tired.  When I arrive back I am in high spirits.  Then I crash the next day.  It’s fairly consistent.  I am not explosively angry I am just kind of short in temper.  Snippy.  I feel bone weary exhaustion and the kids aren’t happy unless I’m running with them.  I really can’t right now.  I’m so tired.  I’m not always.  I won’t feel like this all day.  But it feels like the core of me is just barely on the negative, whiny side.

Noah is trying to express appreciation for me.  For all the work I take off his plate.  I hate feeling like it isn’t enough.  I don’t feel appreciated.  I don’t feel valuable.  I don’t feel effective.  I feel plodding and stupid.  I feel like I am barely going through the motions.  I feel like I’m looking at everything through a dense cloud bank.  I feel like gravity is too heavy.  I think that is what I feel.  Gravity is too heavy.  That makes it harder to do everything.  I have to decide if it is worth the effort.  I still haven’t started packing.  Not for us and not for Shanna.  Shanna is getting picked up at two this afternoon.  I should probably get started.

It doesn’t help my overall feeling bad that last week Shanna was helping me with cleaning.  I didn’t like how nasty her tone was and her word choice in describing the activity.  Do you know where she learned it?  Watching me.  I didn’t say anything to her about it.  She was just reflecting what she sees.  But I’ve been thinking about it.  I haven’t described her toys as crap since.  She doesn’t have crap.  She has high quality neat toys in a dizzying variety.  It’s really not crap.

I’m cheerful sometimes.  I’m not sure why it is so hard right now.  I’m grieving; I think that is part of it.  Grieving for so many things.  I’m more than half way through the first round of editing the book.  I really don’t want it to be an angry book.  I want to tell the story in the most simple and direct way I can.  I don’t want to flail around and be angry forever.  I just want to get it right.  I want to have other people know the simple facts.  I don’t want to be alone with my story.  It’s scary.  I can’t handle being alone with it.

As I run I think about a lot of things.  I think about the one who got away.  Ha.  I have several.  I think about the many possibilities I had open throughout my life.  I think of what choices I made and where.  Which were the most important ones?  Where was the tipping point?

I have the life I wanted.  I really do.  Why aren’t I happier?  Why is everything viewed in terms of me failing?  How have I really failed?  How am I bad?  I’m not really engaging in questionable activity any more.  I think this is as close to the center of the bell curve as I will ever be.  I still feel bad.  I still feel like I am bad.  That’s what makes everything just negative of center.  Because I am.  I can’t help it. I was born bad.  This is why I run as far and as fast as is safe for my body on a training schedule and I yell out the words to Born This Way.

I’m not bad.  I have done a lot of things that other people don’t do.  That doesn’t mean I am bad.  The balance of my life is heavily skewed towards doing and being good.  Why do I still feel so unworthy? I feel terribly unworthy.  God knows I don’t deserve Noah.  He is far nicer than anyone like me deserves.  In this mind frame I even know that he wasn’t trying to cheat.  He did act like a jerk, but good grief how much do I expect one man to put up with while never ever doing anything to retaliate? I deserve a good smack down now and then.  I get too demanding and pushy and uppity.

I don’t like it when I think this way.  I know these thoughts are fleeting.  I know this isn’t how I always feel.  It’s how I feel today.  I’m enjoying this part of growing older.  I feel a lot more security around the fact that I won’t feel this way forever.  And I really do know that I have far more good than bad in my life.

Today my baby goes to her Godmamas.  She is excited.  She loves these visits.  Recently she asked me if we will be together forever.  I told her that depends on how we define it.  I told her that we will always be together again but we won’t do everything together all the time.  Sometimes we will be in separate places but if she thinks about me real hard and knows she will see me again soon it’s like being together at all times.  We will always be together again very soon.  She said that works for her.

Calli has changed dramatically recently and I don’t talk about her in writing much.  My experience of parenting her has been different.  She needs me in very different ways.  For the past few months she needs much more intense physical contact than she seemed to want when she was small.  She is very serious and when things don’t go how she wants she gets this stricken expression on her face.  It’s really pretty hilarious.  I love watching her play with things.  She looks like she thinks more like an engineer.  She isn’t a dilettante.  She wants to sit and figure something out.  That’s not how her sister approached objects so it’s neat to watch.  She makes me understand how uncurious I am.  She also makes me understand that I know so much more than I think I know.  She holds things up and grunts at me.  She wants me to explain.  I always start at the most concrete level with name, color, size, that kind of stuff.  Eventually I get to imaginative uses.  It generally takes several options before I find the right one for her.  Then she nods and runs away.  I’m not sure if I have finally given her sufficient data or if I finally said the right word.  I won’t know until she can talk.

Calli is going to talk on a very different curve than Shanna.  That’s ok.  It means that she feels much less there and I think I’ve been underestimating her for a while.  Her comprehension is fairly astounding.  I think she understands a lot more than she obeys.  She is willfull.  In a very different way than Shanna.  If I try to prevent Shanna from getting what she wants she responds in a very wild, free-swinging way.  She always has.  Calli clenches her fist and shakes with fury.  She may or may not release a few ear-drum-shattering shrieks but mostly she just looks like a bull about to charge.  She doesn’t swing out but she may lean over and bite.  Calli is a runner.  Letting her walk on her own is dangerous.  She won’t come back and she is going faster by the day.  Shanna never went far from me and would come back when I called.  This kid doesn’t feel as strong of a leash to me.

Today I need to pack.  I should probably go do that.  Everything takes a really long time so I had best get moving.  Any second now.  Don’t wanna.

book thinking

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I need to get the details of this down before I forget.  I’m not sure when I am going to be able to start.  The woman who is editing my book hasn’t responded to the last several messages.  Uhm.  Would anyone else like to do it?  I am partway through my first big round of editing.  It’s painful in a variety of ways.  I wrote the book in strange piecemeal fashion moving things around and adding in random order as I remembered.  Thus a given chapter might tell the same story three times in three different ways with different details every time.  I’m trying to consolidate and “improve flow” or some shit like that.

But the idea I want to get down is one that is making me feel pretty nervous.  Noah has been holding me down and forcing me to read comic books.  (Ok, not exactly.  But close.)  I don’t want to do an actual graphic novel, but I want to draw a series of pictures of houses that I have lived in.  Certainly not everywhere I lived, I moved too many times.  There will be a few “amalgam” houses as well.  I want to use the pictures as a base and produce many volleys of text that will eventually mostly fill the pages in a format that looks kind of like “pull out” descriptions of the houses.

The first book will have very few words.  It will be a general outline that is totally appropriate for a three year to look at while learning about my life.  Pictures can be pretty scary.  I’m scared because this is a serious artistic endeavor.  I’m not usually real fond of my art.  Eek.

I have always been obsessed with drawing houses.  Other people seem to have other things that they draw over and over or doodle.  For me it is houses.  I want to find a way to have my house pictures communicate a lot before I say anything about them.  I want to figure out a way to talk to my kids about my life.

Shanna asked me recently, after I apologized for yelling, why I yell so much.  She makes me happy.  I told her, “Well, when I was a kid people thought nothing of yelling at me, hitting me too.  It wasn’t nice.  It made me feel bad.  I decided that I didn’t want to grow up and do that to kids.  But I was yelled at a really lot and I wasn’t taught any other way of dealing with frustrations.  I’m trying to learn but it’s hard.  I’m hoping that if I work hard to learn and you help me learn, both of us won’t need to yell just because something frustrates us.”  She said that sounded like a good plan.

Children believe they have a lot of responsibility.  They think that things happen because of them.  It’s normal and healthy.  I want my daughter to really understand in her soul that when I over react to things it isn’t about her.  She is perfect.  She is exactly what a child and human should be.  I’m not.  Not “it’s not my fault I’m an asshole… I had a bad childhood!”  Rather, there are things that are genuinely harder for me than other people.  I work hard at them but I make mistakes.  I want my daughter to understand that I am making a mistake and there is an appropriate way of acting out there and we are striving towards it.  Everyone makes mistakes.  My mistakes are not because of her.  They are because I am trying so hard at so many things all the time that sometimes I’m not able to put my all into every step and I make a mistake.  How do I fix that?  How do I repair that?

I know other people don’t think that telling their story is a necessary part of that.  I guess that’s what makes me a writer.  I really want to put a smiley with a tongue sticking our right here.  But I won’t.  Because I am dignified and adult and I promised myself I would avoid them in my blog.  Damnit.

The house in Whittier needs to have a conspicuously open window on the side; it won’t be drawn the way my actual window worked because it would be hard to get the angles.  A lot of the focus of that picture will be the tree.  And the hill of gravel I fell down on rollerskates.  And the rock.

The houses in the mountains.  Oh those are going to have details.  I think the first book should say, “This is where I learned to love the trees.”

The apartment row in Apple Valley with that bitch sitting on my front walkway waiting to kick the crap out of me.  Early on Shanna will probably assume she is a friend.  I won’t mention the constant ass-kickings for a few years.

The best part is drawing pictures is something I can do with the kids around.  I’m thinking about playing with mediums.  Some crayon, some paint… not sure what else.  Pencils.  The house in Whittier is going to be the only picture done solely in black ink.  It was an evil place.

I’ve been thinking about this while running.  I’m really enjoying how much thinking I do.  I daydream more than I can at other times.  Usually I get interrupted.  I’m so glad today is a rest day.  I’m exhausted.  I need to stretch.  And I need to go edit that book.  If I want to release it on March 1st I’d better get my ass in gear.

Anything is possible

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Tonight I’ve been working on editing the book.  Reading this makes me feel like I have been kicked in the stomach.  It’s hard to wrap my head around these things happening to me when I am not sitting very still and concentrating on the story.  I dissociate so well.

Sometimes Noah says things to me that really bother me.  He said that it isn’t actually surprising that things started so bad so early because otherwise I never would have adapted.  If you are treated well at all you can’t handle being hurt like I was when I was older.  You just don’t have the instincts for it.  I feel rather mixed.  Ok, that’s not what he said word for word.  But that is as close as I remember.

As I’m editing this book I’m thinking hard about what the next book will be.  I think it should be a children’s book.  I want to find a way to explain me to my kids in a way that is appropriate for very young children.  Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry is a good book, but it doesn’t feel all that applicable to my kids.  If I want them to have a story I think I have to write it.  I want to find a way to introduce the issues around my anger and defensiveness in a way that clearly lets them know it is never their fault and never about them.  It really isn’t.  I have issues.  That happens sometimes.  How do my kids grow up understanding that not everyone is like me?  Mostly they will meet lots of people and just notice on their own.  I don’t want to excuse my behavior.  But I do want them to have a chance of understanding.

I don’t take it for granted that I will have a relationship with any of the people I know today in twenty years.  Not Noah, not my kids, none of my friends.  I am still in contact with very few people I knew twenty years ago.  B.  That’s it.  Our contact is kind of tentative and nebulous and often absent for months or years.  I hope I deserve to still have a relationship with my daughters in twenty years.

I’m struggling emotionally with the vast array of things I have no control over.  Right now I am appreciating my therapist.  She’s good at kind of smirking at me in a way that lets me know that I am over-extending my desire to control.  There is so little I have actual control over in this world.  It’s hard to admit that out loud.  It’s galling.

I’m not sure if I am getting sick or if I am just having physical symptoms of stress.  I fell down today after a lovely dizziness episode.  I wish I hadn’t done it outside on a gravel bed, but oh well.  After that my abdomen was so sensitive my pants felt horribly tight.  I felt like I was very pregnant trying to wear too-tight pants.  That feeling seems to have stopped.  I have had a blinding headache since yesterday.  The muscles in my neck are locked up tight and spasming.  Good times.  I think I’ve been remarkably chipper.  I won’t be taking the kids to Fairyland tomorrow by myself.  Holy moly am I not up for that right now.  I didn’t even run today.  I’ve been managing three days a week of running pretty well but I am having a nasty transition to running four days a week.  I also feel kind of weird about my continued weight loss.  Today I dropped below 150 pounds.  That’s thinner than I thought I could maintain while actually eating food.  As I sit here about to polish off half a box of cookies… I’m just not concerned.  I primarily eat locally raised organic vegetables and fruit, local pastured meat, and a mildly excessive amount of noodles.  It’s ok that I eat cookies sometimes.  I’m dropping weight like I made a New Years resolution.  I swear I’m not trying to lose weight.

I feel really weird about how my body is changing.  I feel like I have lost any right to ever talk about my body experiences as a fat person.  I’m not fat any more.  I can’t use the terms for myself I am used to using.  I have been this thin as an adult.  The last time I was this weight my stomach was concave and you could count my ribs.  That isn’t at all what I look like this time.  I don’t understand bodies.  I’m not even eighteen months postpartum.  I still have a fair bit of belly, though it shrinks by the day.  I have had these firm beliefs most of my life that I simply couldn’t be a thin person.  My German-peasant-stock body just wasn’t going to do that.  I was wrong.  Apparently it just takes 10+ miles of running a week.  No wonder I never bothered doing this before.

I am finally getting to the point where I can attain runners high.  I’ve never pushed myself that hard before.  It’s an interesting experience.  I don’t think I am going to ever be passionate about running.  I’m doing it because I want to know that I ran in the same race as my brother.  I did it.  I can do this with him.  I am really and truly part of that piece of shit family.  It hurts to feel like you are never going to be allowed to think of yourself as part of the family.  Even though I don’t want them.  Even though I am going to avoid contact with my family for the rest of my life.  I love them and want them so much.  I wish they wanted me.  I wish they saw me and were proud.  I wish that at the end of the marathon my brother would smile at me and hug me.  I’m not going to hold my breath.

My brother believes that the only way for people like us to be good parents is to keep our fucking mouths shut and just not pass on the trauma to the next generation.  I disagree with him.  I think that part of being a good parent is talking about things.  I also think that part of being a good parent is going out and doing very hard things and showing your children that it is possible.  Anything is possible if you want it bad enough.  Even though I feel like a piece of shit now, I can change that.  I can find a way to have worth in my own eyes.  Eventually I will be able to feel like I am a good person.  Anything is possible if you want it bad enough.

Ok, I actually only ate two cookies.  But they were hella good.

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Seasons changing.  So much changing.  Uncertainty.  Mood shifts.

It’s getting closer but not fast enough.  I never think things have happened fast enough.  It will be ok.

I have been talking to a lot of people about writing.  It’s astounding to me to wander around to my friends and have them tell me resoundingly that they think I have several books in me, and they want to read them.  I feel this impending sense of doom.  Of course I will fail everyone.  I don’t have anything to say.

I do.  I have things to say.  I have a story to tell.  It’s just as worthy of a story as any other.

If I started writing the book today it would be the story of why I divorced my family.  I don’t know if that is what it will be by November.  It’s morphed a lot over time.  I don’t think that is the right book though.  That’s a mood.

Do you know what will last?  I will write the story of me for my mirrors.  My husband, my Sarah, my kids.  Friends who love me.  I tell this story because if I died tomorrow my story would be gone.  My children would know very little about me.  There aren’t very many people who would or could step up to tell them about me.  The only two people I am still close to from childhood, Jenny and B, they didn’t see almost any of my life.  They can’t tell anything about me.

I only talk about the abuse.  Like that is all that made me.  It’s not though.  No one is that simple.  Everyone is more complicated than that.  But other people grow up with people who see them and help make them for decades.  I didn’t.  No one remembers pithy little stories about what I did in school.  No one remembers that great mission project in fifth grade.  We made it out of cookies and used frosting for glue.  The inside was supported with Lego’s.  It was epic.  No one knows that I spent six weeks doing a mini lesson on aeronautics and could never make a paper airplane fly.  I’m pretty sure I have still never done it successfully.

Do you know what keeps me up at night?  The fear that I don’t exist without my family.  Without the people who do have positive memories of me.  They know every good thing I did as a child and they loved me.  I miss my mommy.  I miss my mommy so much.  I was always a mama’s girl.  I was so clingy.  I begged for her.

I can’t let her do to my children what she did to me.  And I need to explain exactly what that was.  Not really for anyone else, for me.  I need to forgive myself for my choices.  I need to explain them.  I want to.  I want to know that at any point in time my children will have access to all the stories I can give them about myself.  They will never have to deal with the loss I am dealing with.

I know very little about my mom.  I know basically nothing about my father.  I know absolutely nothing about anyone further back in my family.

I am alone.  My brother hates me.  I should not be telling these stories.  He wants them to die.  I don’t think he’d mourn much if I died too.  He would probably think I deserve it.

I don’t.  I want to explain why.  I shouldn’t be dead.  It’s demeaning to me to say I should be dead when you hear about my life.  I’m tired of being told to kill myself.  I’m tired of being told that someone like me should fucking give up.

I don’t want to.  I want to watch my babies turn into children.  I want my daughters to invite me to their fucking weddings.  I don’t want them to run away from me.  That means I want to examine what my mom did that drove me away.  It was there.  It was there from very early on.  Conform or leave.  It’s always been clear.  And I don’t conform much.

I’m scared to really do this and I’m terrified of not doing it.  I want to create the space and do it right.  I am going to tell this.  It will be a book.  I don’t know if it will be worth reading.  I don’t know why anyone will care.

This week a former coworker told me I should write the book.  He will read it.  He thinks lots of people will want to read it.  Why do people write?  Because they have something to say?  Because they have such an overweening ego that they neeeeeeeed to have strokes from random people?  Because I just want to be loved.  I want to feel like, whether anyone agrees with me or not, I explained my side.  It’s not really a debate.  Only it is.  I’m not having a debate with anyone else.  I’m debating with myself.  I’m deciding whether or not I want to forgive me.

I want forgiveness more than just about anything else in the world.  I need it from me.

I asked my favorite student what I taught him.  He smiled at me.  That quirky, gorgeous smile.  I think he had a crush on me.  He told me elaborate stories about sleeping with his 35 year old boss when he was 18.  Ahem.  He told me that I taught him that it’s ok to be yourself.  And to like himself.

I want to teach me, too.  Maybe that is the book.  Why I should like me.  I don’t know.  I am kind of afraid that I am going to write out thirty years of anecdotes and not know how to make it a story.  A story needs a point.  Well, Stephen King tells me otherwise.  I’ll figure it out as I go.  I am so going to need a good editor.

It’s weird to be present with this project.  There are different sorts of things to think about.  There are the later mechanics of dealing with a book looming.  I’m scared.  I’m trying to mostly not worry about that till  February or March.  Mostly.  Periodically I read short things and freak out.  I’ll have to think about that later.

When do I write?  How do I create space to do that reliably?  Ack.  Complicated.

I’m also going to run a 5k with a friend at the end of November.  Oh this fall will feel different from the summer.  I feel like I have to tell the stories all in one big go.  Then I can stop this frantic refrain of hiding in the garage and crying because no one knows them.  Of course I will leave things out.  Life is like that.  I can’t remember everything.  Many of the stories of me are gone.  I don’t really know much about what I was like as a baby.  I know that when I was 14 months old I toddled into the bathroom and said, “Kissy go pee pee” and like that I was potty trained.  I know that my mother told me that.

Given that Shanna was in diapers till she was thirty-twoish months.. holy moly.  And I think of Shanna as being advanced.  Psh.

That was my funny voice.

I don’t want to spend my life dealing with overwhelming flashbacks of abuse as Shanna grows up.  I’m kind of hoping to circumscribe that by doing it at speed in November.  God help me.  No, I’m not going to do a lot of drugs.  That’s hard to control.  I’ll have to be soul achingly bare.  Ew.  I’m worried about being stable the rest of the time.

I’m getting really bitchy and picky.  I feel like I am.  I need… something.  I need to break a rule.  I need to do something I’m not supposed to do.  I am holding too many balls in the air.  Something has to give and give hard.  Right now I’m doing that in the wrong direction.  Too much of it comes out in snippy stupid comments to Sarah.  I need to find an outlet.  Soon.  That’s a really dangerous line of thought right now…  wait.. a very pleasant thought just went through my head.  I’ll be in my bunk.