Category Archives: sex

Things are different this time

Last time it took almost five years after MC before I had renewed interest in sex in a sustained way. This time Her Sweetness is only 18 months old and I feel like I am crawling the walls. I have initiated sex several times this week and I haven’t done that in years. I don’t think I have been this interested in sex since the last time I was in full hunt mode. I am not sure how this switch flipped. I suppose it is for the best that I am only thinking about Noah.

I wonder if getting more privacy is going to result in a renaissance in our love life. I have hope.

I am not just interested in vanilla sex. I am thinking about all sorts of depravity.

I am reading the book Come As You Are and I am thinking about stress and anxiety. I am thinking about what things were like after the older kids were born. I felt so much pressure to hurry up and perform. So much worry about holding appropriate boundaries for the kids. I don’t feel either now. I feel pretty confident that I am a good mother and I have definitely sheltered my kids from my sex life.

They regularly declare things like “You haven’t hit anyone in years.” I think about cutting my submissive open and licking up his blood. They really couldn’t come close to guessing. That’s good.

I don’t know how much I will hang out with local kinky people in the Highlands. I worry about my attraction to people with poor boundaries. I clearly have some scene friends with good boundaries. But the entire city of Inverness is so much smaller. I am trying to think about how to leave space for my kids too.

I have some suspicions about the apples and the tree and all that.

We will see. For now I am just enjoying feeling desire.

Tapping toes

In 4 days my middle child turns 9.

In 6 days we leave the country; Noah has plans to come back for work… the rest of us don’t. Hello Bangkok!

In 9 days we legally own a house in Scotland and my wonderful, sweet, helpful friend will be collecting keys from our solicitor so there is no delay!

In 16 days we arrive in Inverness and the fun truly begins.

Jenny really wants us there. I can tell. She has offered to let us borrow (possibly keep) a very large number of items, including: dishes, a kid bed, an adult mattress, duvets, a crock pot, sheets… It’s like this woman wants me to stay and feel comfortable!

She’s got a 10 year head start on me, but we get to learn how to be Scottish together. This’ll be grand.

I slept meh last night. If I hadn’t missed the night before it would have been plenty, instead I’m still tired.

Ikea then a housewarming. Wake up, Little Susie.

Noah sent out a goodbye email to pretty much everyone we have ever sent an email to. Now folks are coming out of the woodwork wanting to say goodbye. Uh, we left the state already. You missed your window. Where were you all those years we lived there? Busy? Ok. We will take one more possible obligation off your plate.

I want chill. I want green. WHERE IS ALL THE DANG WATER FROM THE SKY!? My body hates this heat wave so much.

Noah and I are making plans. We are going to be living on a much reduced income so we can’t spend money the way we have learned to in the valley. Our food budget is getting cut in half. Really… a bit further than that. It means cakes, cookies, candy, and drinks are going to be very rare treats. Bath stuff and random things can no longer “sneak” into the grocery budget. It’s going to take us a bit to start properly having a tiny savings so that we can make more interesting purchases.

Fitness stuff is going to be a lot of what we do. We are definitely people who like to spend time on our computer but we are also keen walkers. And our house has lots of space for the exercise equipment we favor. I have a TRX set up (it’s a strap system) that helps me through all of my PT and Noah heavily favors kettle bells. We can set these things up in the lounge as a permanent installation and then we won’t have the excuse of “there is no where to do the work”. I’m up a good 25 lbs since we started on this journey and I’d like my clothes to be more comfortable again. Given that I do not intend to waste money on a scale that means I want to start exercising so that I fit my clothes better and I have no idea where I will end up.

Health at every size. Right now I can’t do my exercises (both logistical reasons and strength reasons) and that’s bothering me.

Besides we have more fun fucking each other when we are in better shape. We both hope that with all of the increased access to privacy our sex life might reemerge as a fun hobby we share.

Sex has come a long way. Right now we don’t have sex very often. Like, once or twice a month has been our average for a while. We have no privacy and that’s a big barrier for me. But I’m thinking about sex more than I have for a while. I am not sure it will take a full five years postpartum this time for me to be really interested.

I am 99% certain that my next period will be in my own house. That sounds really wonderful. If it is not too freakishly cold (we’ll see!) I sort of intend to spend several hours on my “Oh my god is that a period or a hemorrhage” day sitting outside with no pants (or trousers!) on. I’m going to bond with the earth, yo. I hope it will be the most relaxing cycle of my life. And less laundry. Bonus.

I am going to get family cloth and a little bucket for every single bathroom in the house. Septic systems are no joke, yo. (With some supplemental paper for getting poop.)

Her Sweetness is absolutely talking up a storm. She tells us “no!” and “stop!” when she doesn’t want something. She says, “Help!” and “please” and “mine”. It’s so funny. She is starting to get colors. She can talk about her getting dressed and clean process in a combination of words and signs. She is super keen to communicate and be part of the pod. She likes carrying a bag when the rest of us are doing so. She loves to laugh.

I am so very grateful I got to have a third child despite the challenges. She is a really wonderful person. It’s so lovely to break the “my kid/your kid” assignation of behaviors and traits and personality bits. She’s like all four of us. She’s completely herself. We all have to work on our petty jealousies and pissiness because she’s a baby and we chose to bring her into this world. We need to be nice about it.

Middle Child has confessed they didn’t know what they were getting into and sometimes it is hard to not be the baby anymore. That makes a lot of sense. They are still so wonderful with their sister. They try hard to be gentle and helpful. They play together. Kiddo is trying so hard and I am so full of love and respect for the efforts.

My kids are growing up and it’s pretty amazing.

The kids are in a funny place with money and chores. They are still doing chores but they keep forgetting to write it down. I tell them that they can work for free or they can get paid for keeping track of their work. Lately I’ve been getting a ton of free work. So they are sad that they are not accumulating more money. Dude! WRITE DOWN YOUR STUFF ON A DAY TO DAY BASIS AND I’LL BLOODY PAY YOU! We sat down yesterday and priced out a basic back-to-school-kit and uniform selection. Now they feel nervous. They kind of slacked off over the last month. They would have been in a great place for all of these purchases but… they stopped writing anything down. Whoops.

It’s a learning experience.

School won’t give you credit for doing your homework if you bring the math worksheet home, do all the work on the separate piece of scratch paper then throw away the scratch sheet and try to turn in the blank worksheet. “But I did the work!” Yeah… that’s not how it works. If you have a job and you neglect to clock in… you can’t just go back at the end of the week and say, “Yeah I was totally ontime every day; you should pay me all the monies!” “But surely I did all of my hygiene this week, pay me.” “I clearly remember you skipping it on day A, B, C, I had to yell at you 7 times on day D…”

Write it down on the day you do it. That’s why you have a day planner. Are you choosing to skip that step? Then you are choosing to make the work free. Cheers and thank you so much for all your hard work. You are definitely working.

It’s a process! Follow through is hard for a bunch of unstable ADHD folk.

Thus Eldest Child is on Pinterest trying to learn about organization systems so she can get one started right when we arrive. It’s glorious.

I am tired and the day is just beginning. That’s ok. I don’t have a lot of proper work to do. I’m day dreaming lists of stuff I will want in the house. Here is a possible list. (We will not show up and buy all of these things instantly, I expect we are going to be Good Customers at the charity shops and we will buy things new as we have to.)

Obviously we have a long way to go.

Kitchen Dining room Family bedroom Bathrooms Noah office Krissy bedroom Shanna bedroom Orion bedroom Lounge Jennabeth bedroom Laundry room Miscellaneous Hall Garden Studio Kitchen stuff
Refrigerator Table and chairs mattresses toilet paper Kettlebells Bed Bed tumbling mats Detergents and soaps Kid school uniforms baby gate Seating? 2 large frying pans
Cleaning tools (sponges, mop, broom) Additional silverware/dishes Blankets soap Monitor clock alarm clock alarm clock couch Shoe rack Lunch boxes Shoe rack Grill 1 small frying pan
Dish soap, dishwasher soap, hand soap Pillows Printer coat rack bars for the wall. chest of drawers chest of drawers Personal water bottles Coat hooks? nanny cam 1 wok
Food storage devices Clock Plungers Caffeine brick Bed Tables and chairs Vacuum Replace fence along burn drafting table 1 large stock pot
child safety locks Sheets Toilet brushes Standing desk Desk w/ ergonoic setup Desk w/ ergonomic setup Desk w/ ergonomic setup Projector bed Replace driveway gate easel 1 medium stock pot
Knives whiteboard for calendar Toilet paper holders? Monitor stand or swing arm WiFi Router etc. paper 1 small sauce pan
tea pot, sugar bowl, milk pitcher Towels whiteboard dresser electric drill art supplies 1 large roasting pan
Clock black out curtains black out curtains black out curtains black out curtains black out curtains 4 cookie sheets
shampoo/conditioner 2 bread pans
rice maker?
insta pot?
eggcarton and curtain soundproofing cutting boards
Crock pot Lighting for video potato masher
Big soup/stock pot grater
Roasting pan for turkey veggie peeler
collander
KitchenAid Mixer mixing bowls
Ice cream machine measuring spoons/cups/pitchers
Deep-dish pizza pan

Obviously I have not accounted for everything. It is going to take many years to accumulate this stuff at the rate we plan to spend money.

It’ll be ok. We have time and patience. In my experience it is a lot easier to do without if you are living with joy in the meantime.

I have five minutes.

I am not sure how I feel. I keep going between happy and sad and joyful and miserable and angry. I have so many feelings about everyone and everything in my life. My kids. My husband. My friends. Noah’s parents.

Noah is a really great partner. But he’s a human being so he gets on my nerves at times. When that happens I struggle with dealing with the fact that I am cranky and upset about him being on my nerves and I feel completely like an asshole because he’s so nice. He’s so bleepin nice to me. It would be absolutely unreasonable for me to expect or demand more from a partner. He’s unreal.

So I feel really bad when he is irritating me. I need to stop feeling irritated. I need to not be bitchy to the best thing that has ever happened to me.

I go back and forth in my head. Are my kids the best thing that have ever happened to me or is Noah? I couldn’t have the kids without Noah so that implies strongly that he is the ultimate best thing that has happened to me. But I try to be honest with myself. I would not try as hard for just him as I do for the kids. I owe the kids in a way I don’t owe him. Even if he is the best.

I love him. I want him. I’m grateful for him.

I need to not owe him though. That’s a really toxic dynamic for us. We tried that for years. We tried so hard to focus on what I owe Noah so that I could keep my energy up and do all of the things we both wanted me to negotiate that I would do.

Owing him makes me hate him. Owing him is tied up with all of the sex stuff that is so broken from my father. I owe all men sex. But Noah wants me to be something different to/with him and that means I need to not owe him.

It’s weird talking to my physical therapist about sex. She has expressed 10+ times that she is really appreciating the way I have boundaries and the way I respect her time and attention. She is not a sex therapist. She is not a therapist. But in order to make progress on my pelvic floor I have to be able to talk to her about my pussy in a way that is complicated and layered and really personal.

Increased functionality means for me that I tear less from sex. Increased functionality means not bleeding or having burning pain in my vagina.

But I can have that if I just drop my sex frequency to like once a month and I tell Noah to not last very long during sex.

But then our sex life isn’t very fulfilling or bonding.

Ok. What is most important for us to enjoy sex together? Is it about a long time of penetration? Is it frequency of penetration? Is it about mutual orgasm? Is it about the skin time?

And I typed for 8 minutes instead of 5. Gotta go.

Intimacy and eroticism

For reasons I don’t understand all morning I have been thinking about cutting. Not in the nasty self harming way.

In the: “I want to remove the barrier between you and me and take you into me” sort of way. In the way that involves slowly moving a scalpel over someone else and licking up the blood.

I feel like I am leaving a trail of liquid behind me as I walk because this idea is so exciting. It’s hard to stop thinking about.

But uhm. I’ll go do my normal life instead.

Processing speed

Sunday was rough for me. Something came up that requires me to set boundaries in ways that make me feel wildly uncomfortable. It maxed out my bandwidth for all boundaries and the day turned into a sobfest as I tried to borrow future spoons to cope.

I’m having this weird feeling of pride because I’m connecting the links in the chain rather quickly for me. There was a thing that genuinely deserves upset and a boundary response like dropping the portcullis. A thing big enough that I’m arranging for adult supervision of the boundary discussion. I need help.

Ok I had to walk around weeping for a day before I could cope with it… but that’s not a long time for me. I’m happy with myself.

On a completely different lighter more hilarious topic. I had a conversation with the kids yesterday about masturbation.

It started out with the word mastication, which I love. I explained how much I love using the word masticate when I talk to teenagers because it is close to the word masturbation and they always twitch in funny ways. My kids laughed as if they got why it was funny… then said “Uhhh what is masturbation?”

I’VE TOLD YOU BEFORE.

I said, “It’s sex with yourself. It’s when you touch your private parts in a private setting.”

“Ohhhhhhhh, that. Oh of course I do that.”

Then my children proceeded to tell me about when they (separately) take the opportunity to go in a room with a locked door for a while. I tried so hard not to blush or look awkward or bug out my eyes. I said, “It sounds like you have figured out how you want to handle this.” The kids nodded and smiled peacefully.

We did not get into any other specifics. I’m good with knowing that you know how to arrange privacy and you know to wash your hands afterwards.

My work here is done. For now.

Trying

I tried to talk about sex stuff yesterday with Noah. These conversations are harder for me than you might assume based on my willingness to write about sex. I talked about how I have a hard time with the fact that my masturbation must be discussed (I have to get permission to orgasm… at all…) but his is off-screen.

It’s not that I want to control his masturbation. It’s that his desire is off screen.

We’ve had this thing for years where he tries to balance my fucked up “won’t say no” crap with… not initiating sex much. It’s a good way for him to ensure he’s not pushing me into something I don’t want. I respect that. It’s a reasonable plan.

Only it means that 100% of the push for sex in our marriage is supposed to come from me. And that’s not as sexy as it sounds. It winds up with me feeling like I’m supposed to turn myself on and be excited about sex and just show up ready. That’s…. not my favorite. It stopped particularly working a long time ago.

So how do we navigate between the landmines of I’d kind of like to feel like my partner actually wants sex with me enough to bring it up and I’m a fucked up person who doesn’t set healthy boundaries in the moment because I have all kinds of messed up stuff around owing Noah and me not in general having a right to say no to sex and….

So I get that this is shitty for him. It’s not fair. It’s complicated. But it’s also not exactly a walk in the park for me. If I’m expected to just show up turned on… yeah that’s not always going to happen. So if the frequency for sex has to come spontaneously from me without outside influence or turn on… then uhm… don’t be upset if it takes me a while between that being true. And he does get upset. Not like mean to me upset, but it feels bad to him.

So he wants me to spontaneously initiate sex all the damn time because I desire him so much.

But then we run into another issue. I’ve had it programmed into me since I was literally a child that I’m kind of a monster if I push for sex.

“I won’t say no” (on Noah’s end) isn’t the same thing as a partner who feels like they are enthusiastically there for the same thing who also initiates and indicates interest and asks for things.

Let’s talk about bdsm stuff. Noah has long said he’d like to practice rope stuff. This only comes up if I mention it. Which means I end up feeling like this is one more thing I’m pushing and I shut down. Which prompts Noah to feel like I don’t want to do bdsm with him.

And round and round we go.

How to get things started is hard.

We both have different “I won’t say no” responses. For him it means that if sex is brought up he will always say yes because he always wants more than he is getting. He always feels like sexual contact is a good thing. For me, sex has been currency as long as I have been alive. So I feel like saying no to it is doing a bad/wrong thing.

Which is complicated. I am hyper aware that Noah is a better husband than I deserve. It wouldn’t have been possible to observe my sessions with the last therapist I fired and not notice that clearly the perception is that Noah is better than I deserve. She spent a lot of time talking about what I owed Noah for being so nice to me.

That’s the thing. If you are nice to me, I owe you for it because there is no chance I just deserve it. Because I’m hard and not really worth it.

And so if I need more from foreplay I should shut up and suck up that need because I am really not worth more effort than I get. Which makes saying “slow down” or “not yet” almost impossible because I know that doing so is inappropriate because I already ask for too much in a global sense.

So during this pregnancy when Noah has invited me to hang out with him while he was masturbating… that’s probably been some of the most creative sex of our marriage. It doesn’t always result in PiV but occasionally it does. It’s more about being around each other. If I need to just lay there and watch it’s ok. Because he didn’t ask me for sex. I didn’t agree to sex. So I don’t have to feel like I must follow through no matter how I feel. It’s been really nice for me. It’s been a window into his sexuality without me being on the hook for following through on an activity that might literally hurt me.

I’m really sorry that my vagina is broken.

This stuff is really hard to talk about. I feel so much shame for being so broken. It isn’t my fault. I can’t do anything about it. But I inflict it on other people by existing.

So yeah. It’s hard to talk about sex and ask for anything.

Research I should pay for

https://business.highbeam.com/435395/article-1G1-171858947/impact-sexual-coercion-psychological-physical-and-sexual

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0886260513506052 (slightly summarized/interpreted here: http://www.medicaldaily.com/repetitive-sexual-assault-affects-psyche-more-we-ever-thought-284542)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777339/     from this one:

The latest amendment of the Indian Penal Code concerning rape laws in 2013 claims to be not only gender neutral, but also worded broadly. However, regarding the definition of force and consent, it continues to be ambiguous and fails to address many issues. An example is the exemption from marital rape which assumes marriage to be a generalized sort of consent for a man to have sexual intercourse with a woman whenever he wants. Problems in interpretation of consent also exist in cases in which the defendant and complainant are non-married acquaintances.

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2458-11-29

http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/global_campaign/en/chap6.pdf

Unpack another layer

The kids are doing their academics. I have a bit where they can’t see my screen. I’m doing that teacher trick of sitting facing the students.

So sex is a complicated thing in my life. I haven’t had the usual experience of having a body and growing up and deciding to have sex. I’m going to try to unravel this thread a little and see if that makes any sense.

Sex started for me before I can remember. I don’t remember much of the early sexual stuff with my father… my earliest memories are of pressuring neighbor children into sexual contact because I knew I was supposed to.

That was what I was for. I had sex with a lot of neighbors.

Very quickly that became “how I tried to make friends” and I learned the joys and pitfalls of that. I can fall in love with just about anyone. But it freaks a lot of people out and they don’t want to know you any more because you are gross. It’s complicated.

I had this spree of 25 year old men when I was 12. Then I stuck with younger ones again for a while. Then I went really old and fucked this 43 year old when I was 15. Then I had my one year of celibacy when I was 16. It was really weird.

I think 16 is the only age of my life where I haven’t had sex. That’s it. That was my one year off from sex this life.

Then a few basically age appropriate people who were highly consenting… I had learned how bad I felt about coercing people…

Then I had a four year long relationship with a dude 11.5 years older than me starting right before I turned 19. I think that a lot of problems in his life and in our relationship stem from him having an overly large dick. He was frankly just acclimated to it not being part of his sex life and that was complicated. I felt like I was supposed to be having sex. But it was during this relationship that I went to an ob/gyn who looked up my twat with a clear speculum and said, “Yeah of course sex hurts you all the time” and showed me a maze of scars.

The scars have faded at this point. I have looked more recently with another clear speculum.

I have quick healing flesh. I didn’t scar with all the cutting either and it’s not that I was a wuss about it. I used to use god damn serrated knives to saw at myself. I should be scarred as fuck. But my skin doesn’t scar much.

It makes me feel like I am lying. The tracks of my life should be walking up and down my arms and legs and on my face and on my chest and and and…

I heal. And feel like a liar.

I’m aging into a cared for white lady. Holy shit. That’s fucking weird.

I don’t look as haggard as I should. I blame Noah.

After I left my Owner I went nutty. I multiplied my bodycount by 4 in a period of about 2 years. I tried as hard as I could to fuck everyone.

As weird as it sounds… I was trying to learn. I was trying to have a meal sometimes. I was looking for the spark, someone who didn’t look at me as if I were disposable.

And I met Noah. And dated Noah. And dumped Noah. The sex was great. The prospect of being a co-primary was not even a little bit like what I wanted for my life.

I went and fucked a whole bunch of other people. I lived with someone for 9 months and it was awful. Ok, the sex was… mixed… but he was the most verbally abusive person I ever dated. When I told him I didn’t want to have an argument and I left the room he would follow me to keep screaming and beat on the locked door. It was not good. I’m way better off that he dumped me. Even if it was on Thanksgiving. I’m forever thankful he’s gone.

Then Noah came back. The last 11 years have been interesting.

I have used sex in a lot of ways. I have used sex for making friends. In exchange for a place to sleep or food. I have used sex to make people feel better about themselves because I liked them and thought they deserved a boost; I didn’t think I had much else to offer.

I’ve always felt I had to buy my right to be alive and I don’t have a lot of coin to spend. I do what I can with what I have. A lot of that has been sex.

I learned how to dissociate to deal with pain very early. I’ve never been very comfortable with sex that was particularly focused on my body. I’m there to perform, not to enjoy. Charitably I will say that I am “very service focused”. But that’s complicated when the service I’m providing literally hurts me.

I’m not saying it is Noah’s fault I hurt. It’s complicated.

I told Noah when we first got together that we were going to have problems because I don’t really say “no” when I should. I was telling the truth.

It is hard that I know that a lot of our sexual problems are my fault. If I could effectively communicate about what I wanted from sex without shame then this would be a much more workable situation. Instead I’ve created a situation where both of us feel really ashamed about talking about sex. Wheeeeeee go me.

fuuuuuck.

In any case. I’ve gotten to the point where it’s not ok with me that I be compelled to have sex by some internal force that says it really doesn’t matter what I want. I was born for this.

I don’t know how to feel sexual autonomy and especially not when I’m staring at the expectations of someone who married someone hypersexual because they wanted to have sex constantly forever.

It’s complicated.

Bait and switch I guess.

I’m sorry. I didn’t know it would shut down so completely with child bearing and have a terrible time coming back. And here we are starting again.

Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?

Because we want to meet this person. It is worth a lot of time and money and literal pain to get to meet this person.

My babies are wanted.

They will never ever know what it feels like to know your mother probably should have aborted you because she really didn’t want you and she had nothing left to give to this product of rape.

Which is no intended shame to the women who carry that burden; rape is not fair. There is no fair to be had.

Just sadness.

When your kids are in therapy their therapists ask you a lot of questions about adverse childhood experiences. They don’t use that language, but they are trying to suss out how your kids have been fucked up. Our kids have been god damn wrapped in bubble wrap while having tremendously high expectations dumped on their heads for manners and behavior and hearing constant swearing. So their life has been kind of unusual. Therapists ask what kind of education education kids have had about sex. They tend to beam happily when I rattle off the contents of our library and say “I’ve elaborated about some other technicalities (rattle off list of stuff I teach) and we are adamant that sex is fun when you are physically and emotionally ready“.

My kids have such a fascinating understanding of sex. They each have very different opinions about how much they are looking forward to it and they are concerned with different parts of it. It is so abstract and “someday” for them that I…

I feel like an alien. I never had that period of ignorance.

Watching it hurts. I’m so jealous. I never got to have a time when my body was about me peacefully living in it without pain.

Dissociating is harder now. I have to be with my children in mind and in spirit as well as in body. I have to be ready to respond to interruptions alllllllllllllllllllllllll day long with good humor and patience no matter what random shit they are on about now. I have to be ready to react to any of a hundred thousand things on a moment’s notice.

I have to be here.

Mary Poppins doesn’t get to be a zombie. That bitch is on.

This is my dream job.

It makes it hard to turn that on selectively.

We’ve spent the last several years paying ridiculous quantities of money trying to get me to be in less pain. While continuing to inflict pain on my cunt.

I wonder how much my inability to ever calm down or my sleep issues are related to pain and how much all of my inflammation is tied to my sex life.

I wonder.

It’s been part of my life all of my life so it’s not like there is a before to point to.

The ways I coped with that in the past are not available to me now.

I’m feeling very pissed off that I may get forced into something that resembles a healthy coping habit out of sheer desperation. Fuck everything.

I have worked on a lot of other things and I’ve made leaps and bounds of progress. I haven’t really made progress in this area in years. I put it on the back burner and walked away.

I don’t even know how to do this.

owie seks

So yesterday I initiated sex. I was interested. I had been thinking about it. We didn’t have a lot of time in between kid drop off and pick up so I tried to get things going quickly (even though that hasn’t been working well for my body.)

It started hurting. It started hurting in that “Are you fucking me with a sawzall dildo covered in fucking sand paper??!?!?!!” way. (I have in fact been fucked with a dildo on a sawzall. It did not have sand paper on it.)

My first instinct was to slam my eyes shut and grit my teeth and start praying it would end soon.

My second impulse was that I really should let him know it hurt so that he wouldn’t try to draw it out and make it last longer.

My third impulse was, Hey wait… this is hurting in a bad way.

My fourth impulse was, “WAIT! THAT HURTS! I DON’T WANT IT TO.”

He stopped.

That entire first through fourth impulse process probably didn’t have two minutes of time lapse. I’m pretty impressed with myself. Ok, that’s kind of pathetic. But it’s not. This is incredibly hard for me. This is changing a lifetime of specific training.

Noah was really nice about it. He responded as soon as the message reached his brain. He was patient and kind and non-demanding. We both sat there kind of stunned for a minute or two after we paused trying to figure out what it meant.

I told him he could finish… my body just isn’t up for participating. I nuzzled him and encouraged him and he masturbated and I think it was good.

I wasn’t mad at him for the pain. He wasn’t trying to hurt me. I don’t think he messed up at any point.

I think we both had a hard moment when we tried to parse “What do we do about exclamations of ‘It hurts’?” because I’m a masochist fucking a sadist and sometimes that’s the point. But there are very different kinds of pain and we are still trying to tease out what that means.

The cunt hurting pain is…

different.

It’s damage, not fun pain.

I sort of feel like when my cunt hurts like that it is kind of like the equivalent of erectile dysfunction… only mine hurts a lot. It’s a sign the body just says “not today” and that means you need to do something else.

It’s still complicated. But we did well yesterday. Yay us.

I smell sex and boundaries, yeah.

For reasons I don’t understand I was never really willing to get into my sexual hangups with my previous shrink. I saw her for five years, through my marriage, when I’ve had what I would consider a moderately high number of sexual hangups and problems and I just… wasn’t real willing to talk to her about it.

I’m not sure how willing I am to talk to the current person about it but I need to at least talk to myself.

I pay good money to have people help me with my behavior in the larger world. I figure out sex as best I can on my own since Traci. I miss Traci. I could talk to her about wanting to say no and not being able to say no. Traci is my shrink who OD’ed on heroin. I get most attached to other folks who have big problems.

But back to my sex life.

I feel like being 18 years out frames all of it so differently. I’ve now had 11 years of marriage. The framework around sex feels different now. I’ve now had 11 years of legal, state sanctioned, appropriate sex. Holy crap.

But during my childhood sex was a constant topic. My family didn’t uhhh do sex education the way I do sex education (with books, lectures, and youtube videos about consent!) instead I was just told all the things I’d have to do. Consent was… not a word anyone in my family cared about. You have holes, that’s all the consent anyone needs.

My mother told me when I was a child that marriage meant being someone’s permanent whore and you don’t get to say no ever again so pick carefully.

And people question why I won’t let my mother speak to my children.

I still, to this day, struggle with figuring out when I want to have sex. I have a lot of compulsions around sex. I have had a lot of sex I felt like I must have but I’m not sure how often that was the same thing as wanting it. I know I wanted some of it but I honestly don’t know how to tease the strands apart.

What does it mean to “want” something you aren’t allowed to turn down?

I pulled a bait and switch with Noah. I thought I could keep that up my whole life and I promised him I would and I can’t. Not and be nice to him. I can’t spend the rest of my life with my god damn cunt hurting because free access to fucking a cunt whenever he wants to is what he bought with his marriage contract… and be nice. There’s a line in there somewhere and I don’t even know where it is. I’m trying to figure this out but it’s hard.

I feel like a contemptuous loser because I should god damn just be able to say yes and no to sex when my body wants to and it is ridiculously hard for me because when I try to check in with my body like that… often I just don’t know what I feel. Not really. Not till I try and realize it’s failing and then I don’t ever feel like saying “stop” is ok.

Then I’m that horrible cunt who gave someone blue balls. I don’t get to do that.

My current shrink was talking a lot about how boundaries are what allow for connection because if you aren’t in a safe zone for both peoples boundaries… you can’t ever really connect people folks aren’t safe enough to really connect.

I feel like that’s a lot of what happened to sex over the past few years. It stopped being about connection for me because it was a harmful mechanical process I just had to get over with.

I have to be fair… since I cheated things have improved. Noah isn’t assuming anymore. We are having sex way less often and it’s better than it’s been in I couldn’t tell you how long.

I feel guilty that I had to blow up the boat and do a lot to wreck my marriage in order to finally get Noah to hear the boundary “I need our sex to change.” I feel like I tried to communicate it in less dramatic ways and I failed. I was unable to properly speak my needs. I couldn’t figure out how to properly and effectively say, “I can’t be a voiceless whore anymore.”

But good golly saying, “Fine if sex with you isn’t going to be fun I need it to be fun with someone” that sure got things to change.

And things have been way more fun since.

But I’m scared. How do we continue this trend? How do I get better at advocating for myself in one of the most intimate areas of my whole life? I can state my needs so clearly I make doctors sneer at me for “being so good at advocating for myself” when they don’t want to hear it but figuring out how to get what I want from sex…

I thought I had it figured out but I had a performance figured out. I knew what acts to do and I knew how to manage my anxiety and discomfort so I didn’t flip out at people as I submitted to things I didn’t necessarily want.

I need to change this.

Noah is absolutely right that he tried to put measures in place that would require my consent/willing participation. But I just learned to put them into my mechanical process of “Fine this is part of what I have to do before I submit.”

I’m seriously not blaming Noah for me having these troubles. These problems predated him and they would exist if he wasn’t in the picture. He’s the rock I’m throwing myself against but it isn’t his fault I’m ground down. That’s me. If I wanted to share some responsibility… it comes from my parents. But the thing is, I’m a 36 year old woman. It comes from me.

Noah and I have talked a lot about the cheating. It hurt him really badly and processing it makes a lot of sense. Something he keeps coming back to is he feels I picked people who were “so much like him”. But to me they didn’t feel like him in some very important ways. I don’t have a legal contract with any of them that my mother brought me up to believe is a permanent contract where I don’t get to have sexual autonomy. That makes any and everyone different. Because I don’t have the same internal belief about what I am absolutely obligated to provide. If any of those people do something that I don’t like… I can get up and get dressed and leave and never see them again if I choose.

That makes it entirely different in my mind.

It’s not about the acts, per se, it’s about my degree of autonomy within the acts. My yes or my no decide everything.

At home I rarely bother to say yes or no because I act like it doesn’t matter anyway.

And I’m not saying that is a healthy justification for poly or an open relationship. A healthy justification for poly or an open relationship is that folks negotiated for it and both are ok with it. I do “understand” that. But my ability to make the healthiest choice available varies.

I’m truly not blaming Noah for this. He’s been trying to navigate these treacherous waters for a long time now. He’s tried a lot of ways of asking. A lot of ways of approaching. A lot of ways of indicating that I really don’t have to. My sense of compulsion doesn’t really come from him.

But I feel guilty that I pulled a bait and switch. I told him he could have a whore he could fuck every day without caring if I wanted it or not. Now I really can’t live up to that. I feel ashamed.

STDs

In the past few years, since having children, multiple people in my body count list have contracted various STDs. Syphilis has appeared multiple times.

Hey folks: if you are anything other than COMPLETELY MONOGAMOUS you need to get tested early and often. If you lie to your doctor about your sexual habits you are endangering yourself and everyone you sleep with. That’s not cool.

I have only a vague understanding that other people are ashamed about their behavior and that’s why they lie about what they are doing. This is odd to me. If I feel ashamed of doing something… I stop doing it. Or I figure out what is fucked up in my moral code and I change that so I’m not ashamed any more.

I don’t think you are bad if you have promiscuous sex. I think there are many reasons people do this, most of them pretty morally neutral.

But when you lie about what you are doing and you place people at risk… that’s different. That’s not about the sex. That’s about not being honest with people you supposedly care about. That is not acting like people matter. That is acting like only your shame matters.

I will be honest and say I am not well equipped to understand why people will hover over their shame and protect it and defend it and make sure it stays entrenched. That baffles the shit out of me.

I talk about the worst shit I do on the open internet where anyone can read it if they so choose. I do not understand hiding in shame.

My experience of hiding with shame is my family. My sister does that. My child raping sister does that. My child raping father did that.

Fuck. Hiding. What. You. Do.

If you aren’t hurting anyone, there is no reason to be ashamed of what you are doing. If you are hurting people with what you are doing STOP IT. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU.

Lying to ongoing partners is not ok. It’s just not. Not volunteering health information to people you intend to fuck again is lying. So I will interpret not being told important health information as someone deciding that they never want to have intimate contact with me again. Ok, that’s fine. I’m a real pain in the ass so I get why trying hard to make sure that door stays open isn’t always worth the effort. That’s legit. I’m not upset about that. No one needs to keep a door open to possibly fucking me again.

But if you don’t want to tell me about what is going on with your health… that’s making a decision. A permanent decision. A decision that decides whether or not I will ever trust you to be honest with me again.

That’s just how life goes.

The funny thing is, I’ve had partners come to me and say “I got a positive result.” My response was, “Well… let’s look at how we have safer sex. We might want to adjust some behaviors.” I didn’t reject them and I didn’t stop having sex with them over it. Shit happens and I love you not your STD status.

people.

Yesterday one of my former students told me I wasn’t accepted into SFSI because I’m not a “real sex educator.”

I countered with, “I was teaching at national bdsm conferences when you were in junior high. So you are more real than me?” I laid out a whole bunch of my other sex education CV. She said, “Oh my god I didn’t know any of that.”

Yeah. Fuck your assumptions. I think I didn’t make it into SFSI because they had to reject more than 50% of people applying and my availability was very limited.

But whatever.

GET OFF MY LAWN.

Family, opinions, planning

There isn’t much in this world I like as much as I like how much my children want to spend time with me. Last night they begged me to sleep in their room between them. I was there for six hours until my back was hurting enough that I needed to change beds. I was sad to leave them, but gosh I get to hurting.

I read a lot of development stuff. There are some seriously contradictory opinions out there. Some folks (who will remain nameless cause I ain’t sending support their way) really believe it is terrible for me to provide as much support and physical affection as I provide. “Children need to get used to being alone.”

I got used to being alone. It broke something inside of me I don’t know how to fix. Naw, I’m good with not doing that to my kids. We deal with the separation that we need to deal with, but I don’t force space between us. My kids ask for space as they desire more of it and I let go and give them a little push. “Sure! Try your wings! Jump out of the nest! Do it! Do it!” But I’m standing behind them at first before I fling myself headlong at the ground to be there to catch them if they need it.

My children aren’t really alone as they try things. Sometimes I stop and reflect that my children are some of the least-alone people I’ve ever personally known. I did that. Wait: I did that.

Holy tomato. I took this hole inside of me and I decided “Ok that piece is not getting passed on” and I haven’t. I have been able to do what I set out to do.

My kids treat one another like they are a matched set. They get whiny about how much time they are separate for camps a few times a year. They are together and happy about it every day. My constant harping on how they are a team must help. I tell myself. Because I want to feel useful. It’s working.

I have children who believe deep in their bones that we are happier, stronger, and better together as a group than we can be alone. After I grew up feeling like I poisoned everything I touched. How did that come to be?

It started with Noah. It started with the fact that I don’t poison him, I help him. I make him feel more motivated and alive and inspired than he has ever been in his whole life. Nothing ever jump started him like me.

That’s pretty cool because he was a neat guy when I met him. He’s grown up so beautifully. I’m not entirely sure I married a man. He really may have still been a boy. At this point, he’s a man and it is so beautiful. He’s responsible. He’s diligent. He’s caring. Where he has tendencies towards flakiness or fucking up he has devised elaborate systems of checks and balances so he can’t drop anything important on accident. He taught himself how to stop fucking up. That’s huge, yo.

I appreciate how self-reinforcing our family values are. We value hard work and the pursuit of health. We think exercise and outside time are necessary to health and if the grown ups are slacking and lazy the kids tell us to get off our butts and do it. It is a glorious system. My kids think that life is a balance of work and rest and if you do too much of one or the other you develop problems so you have to pay attention to your schedule. When I work too much, they come down on me to rest. “Mom you will get sick. Don’t act like this.” My kids will comment on how we need more protein and vegetables to balance out the sugar we eat.

They are going to be some micromanaging motherfuckers when they are grown. It will allow them to be excellent at a wide variety of careers.

My kids are fierce. They are always the most female-presenting looking kids in the fighting group at whatever kid event we go to. They love to fight and they are getting better and better at sportskidship. Less gloating over winning. More “that was a really fun game, thank you for playing with me”. It is a work in progress. I use the word fierce because that is the most common word that random parents observe about my kids. “Wow they are fierce.” “Yup, they are.”

My kids have never been taught to soften themselves because people expect that from folks born with a vulva. Psh. Whatever.

In our house we talk about what it means to be a person born with a vulva and a uterus and what it means to be a girl and a woman. We are very clear that there are some maintenance acts that happen to anyone with these body parts but that doesn’t make you a girl or a woman just like having long hair wouldn’t make you a boy or a girl. But whether you are a boy or a girl you have to care for long hair–it’s just something that takes effort. Bodies take work and the nature of that work does not define who you are.

I’m well aware that there are people in this world who do not approve of how I am raising my children. I’m well aware that there is no “right way” to parent. I don’t think I’m doing it th One Twue Way. I think I’m adapting to my quirks and issues and my childrens’ quirks and issues and my partner’s quirks and issues and devising a system that makes us happy. That doesn’t mean it applies to other people.

Sweet cheese I don’t think I know what you should be doing. You are so different from me. You have such wildly different needs from this parenting journey. If I told you what to do I would hurt you and I would probably hurt your kids.

I need to remind myself of that more often. Even when I have a very strong opinion about an aspect of other people’s parenting I need to shut my fucking mouth. I’ve been failing at that lately in a specific case. I need to back all the way off. I can’t control other peoples actions. I need to stop trying.

Sometimes it is haaaaaaaaaaaaaaard not sharing my opinion.

Suck it up, wench.

I know there are a multitude of reasons I would make different decisions. Just one small aspect of our life would have to change and I would believe I needed to alter almost everything. I don’t think my path is the right one. It’s just the one I’m on.

I ask my kids about school regularly. I am not married to home schooling (even though I love it for entirely selfish reasons and I would cheerfully keep them around forever) I am choosing it as the right path for now. I really didn’t want to send my children to school before the age of 7 or 8 for a variety of developmental reasons… but past that… school is probably fine or healthy unless you have reason to know that a specific school is a bad match for a given kid. I just seriously think the US fucks up early education.

Up until I started painting my house like mad I flat yelled at anyone who hinted in any way that I was an artist. Because in kindergarden I was told I couldn’t do art right and I would never be good at it.

I wanted my kids to skip the imprinting of kindergarden.

Achievement: unlocked.

Now what?

I’m pretty sure I should stop calling us unschoolers. We are eclectically home schooling. We aren’t following a formal curriculum but we are borrowing aspects of a bunch of different curriculums and wandering back and forth as I see fit. I’m also making a bunch up because I’m totally trained in how to do that.

This is getting way fun. Youngest Child is being allowed to very slowly work through first grade. Kiddo is in first grade and I don’t need to push at all. Kiddo opts in to doing work. (I said kiddo didn’t need to start till next year but they were bored.) So I pushed Eldest Child a bit and at this point she is solidly where she would be if she had been doing academics for the last three years.

The amount of progress they have both demonstrated this year kind of blows my mind. Eldest Child started off the year seriously delayed academically and she isn’t anymore. Holy crap. I have always been just praying I wasn’t fucking her over too much. I was totally taking it on faith that things would work the way they did.

Thank. Fucking. Goodness it worked out. That wasn’t actually guaranteed. Science experiments involve the possibility of complete failure.

I’ve been aware from day one that I’m not raising my children in a given cultural tradition. I’m raising them as a science experiment in which I get to control the variables. Yeah, yeah I researched a ton of theories first. I’m not just flying blind. I’m making conscious choices. This is a science experiment. Let’s see if I can hold it together for 20 or 30 years. 30 god damn years. I didn’t want that many years of parenting. I wanted to have kids closer together than that. Sigh.

I want more kids. I want them so much it is a constant ache inside of me. People tell me to adopt. People tell me to find “Chosen Family”.

I want more people who are related to me. Who come back. Who want to see me. There is a fierce ache inside of me.

I have so many cousins and aunts and uncles and a mother and a sister and a brother and nephews and a niece…

And they prefer loyalty to rapists over me.

I want to have children. This is my only chance at having the kind of family that other people get to have. I know people who adopt and have it go well. I know people who were adopted who had a shit show of a life experience because they never ever got over the fact that they didn’t get to stay with their mother.

It’s a roll of the dice with someone’s life. I respect people who can do it. I’m not in that place.

I wouldn’t write about it so often but someone or other brings it up with me every god damn week.

Noah and I talk about moving somewhere more rural in a few years. Somewhere we could have a much bigger house and spending a decade or two fostering kids. Fostering children is different. I have always felt a call towards fostering. But I’m not in the right place in my life for it for a variety of reasons.

I’m working towards it.

But I want more children and my window on that opportunity is not going to be open much longer. My body is not exactly in perfect working order and that’s not going to improve when I hit 40.

Hey I’ll be having kids in the same age range as most of my friends who have kids who are the same age as my older kids. See, I do want to emulate your life experiences. Sorta. In that way that my emulations usually barely resemble the originals.

I like that we are all different. I like that we need such different kinds of support. I learn so much from knowing you. I learn about things that I could never understand without your explanations. Thank you for your patience with me.

I try to not be too obnoxious with my lack of initial understanding.

Individuation is going to have to be a thing next year. I’ve subsumed in a way that is eating me. I noticed something yesterday. I completely flipped out and started dating when Pam left. I think that Pam was filling a huge intimacy hole in my life and I didn’t know or understand what that meant until she was gone.

I miss you Pam. I support you in what you are doing. I know it has value and I know you need to do it. You are learning things you need to learn. I miss you. You have value all the time. You have extreme value to me personally. I support you in not always prioritizing my needs. I really do. But I’m allowed to miss you. That’s ok.

Everyone who loves me is busy as fuck. It isn’t personal. It has nothing to do with me and I’m not allowed to be cranky about it, not really. I pick people who have a lot going on to love intensely. That’s something I do.

I need to figure out how to have consistent contact with folks. We are going to try some arrangements of inviting folks over. We’ll test some approaches. Some things will work. Some things will fail. Both results will teach us stuff.

It’s going to be an adventure to start trying harder to have non-sexual relationships with some folks I like having sex with. For a lot of the past ten years I have just avoided specific people at times when it wasn’t opportune to be jumping them. I have treated more than one man kinda like a meat stick and I need to stop that. I need to expand some of my comfort zone. I need to get better at enforcing boundaries other than with actual walls.

This will be a drama filled adventure. Oh fun.

I hope we don’t fuck up too badly. Erf. I hope that I manage to learn these lessons without more turnover of friendships.

like the people I know. I would prefer to keep them.

Sometimes people ask me with paranoia about my agenda for wanting to know them. What I want to get from you is pretty simple: understanding of how and why another person makes the choices they make. If you let me learn about you I will be able to make better, kinder decisions in the future because my understanding of what people might need will be expanded. Thank you.

And if there is anything I can do for you that helps reduce the pain you feel at being alive, let me know. I fucking live for that shit.

Life is hard. I need you. I am a selfish bastard and I wish you needed me too. Most of you don’t need me and I get that. I accept it because there really isn’t another option. But I wish you needed me the way I need you. I cannot be an understanding person without trying to understand you.

I really want to understand people as a larger group. As a collective. I have to do that through individuals. My data is entirely made up of anecdotes and I’m ok with that.

Only in the anecdotes do I hear the why behind peoples beliefs and actions.

I’m going to rewrite Outrunning Suicide next year and I’m going to do it through talking to children. I’m going to find some and work through the chapters one by one with kids. If I can’t explain it in a way that the younger kids can get… it is still too advanced. Right now it is challenging for some adults to read. That’s not the book I’m trying to write. So I need to rip it apart and break it down into smaller pieces.

It’s going to be a lot of work. That’s ok. It is worthy work.

I need to feel like I am doing more in this world than just being super nice to my crotch droppings. I mean, it’s a good thing to do… but I need more than that. Writing the books I have in my head is part of how I will establish the reputation and credibility I will need for building the incest database. My runway on that is extending by an extra ten years. I should put that time to good use and write some of the other books I need to write.

I know I have at least ten books in me and I’m still working on the second one. Time to get the lead out.

I’m getting closer to being able to understand how to tell Part 2.

I know there are several books in me about family dynamics aimed at children. Aimed at teaching them a vocabulary with which to seek out help.

I think I have a truly terrifying children’s board book to graphic novel series in me that slowly unveils layers of stories of abuse. It’s going to be really god damn disturbing. But educational. “When I was a child I spake as a child; when I became a man I put away childish things.” How does understanding of these topics grow and change and morph? What does the boogeyman mean? How is it used? How could it be useful? What is just… entertainment? What do we owe as family obligation?

Am I ever going to be the grownup I see in my head? Will I ever feel like I am a real person who deserves to be loved because they have ruddy well earned it?

I frequently see people espouse the view that no one should have to earn love. We all just deserve it. Well. I can see how you would want to believe that. Sure. I haven’t experienced a world where that is how it works. I could rail at the world for existing in this form or I could work really hard to try and earn love. I’m going to fuck up sometimes. It is going to backfire sometimes. Standing still and stomping my feet and saying, “But I deserve it so give it to me” hasn’t ever worked for me.

I’ve had to work on my behavior. My mood swings. My actions in the world. My fucking facial expressions. My kids won’t even let me fucking cuss much anymore. What the hell.

I have had to learn to tolerate types of touch that irritate me and I’ve had to learn how to reject types of touch I like a lot in order to have this life. It is a painstaking process.

There are people in this world who get to occupy positions they haven’t really earned. That hasn’t been my life experience very often. I work. That’s how I get things.

Time to stop typing. I missed you, internet.

Love, friendship, dating, and sex.

This has been a year of trying things to see what fits. What improves situations. What makes things worse. I end the year with a lot of mixed feelings. I didn’t manage to love myself more.

After experimentation and months of talking… Noah has asked me to commit to never dating solo again. Polyamory is off the table. No, we won’t reevaluate that at year twenty. When I go out on dates Noah feels like he wants to die and that’s not ok. When Noah dates I feel relief that he has found someone better than me and it is ok for me to die.

Dating… doesn’t seem to be in the cards. Ok.

What does love mean then? Because we both have intense feelings of love for many people in this world. We both say “I love you” to people and mean it with our whole hearts.

Noah got to relearn this year that other people think that saying that means you want to Commit To A Relationship. I am lucky in that most of the folks I say it to accept it as a gift and don’t really think of it as meaning more than that. I get to be a comet in your life. Not a girlfriend.

I feel like my impulse to avoid women for casual sex was a good one right now. Both times Noah really reached out to women this year… they weren’t looking for casual. They wanted to be important. They deserve to be treated like they are important–no argument from me. But that doesn’t mean that we have it to give in the way they need to receive it.

I’m feeling pretty shitty about the way we hurt some folks this year. We needed to learn more about ourselves and that is a messy shitty process sometimes.

I find it fascinating that the men I reached out to have universally said, “Don’t worry about me. Fix your marriage. I’ll still be your friend in whatever capacity later.”

That hasn’t been the response of the women. I lost a friend. Noah learned that he isn’t going to be able to continue a friendship he wanted to continue.

That’s fair. It’s ok that there are consequences to our actions. We earned them.

But this is why I didn’t pursue women. I knew that what I was doing was messy and complicated and I didn’t know how it would end up. Thank you, lovely forgiving men.

I completely and totally understand why the women who were approached responded the way they did. I get it. I do. I think their reactions are understandable, fair, and appropriate.

Frankly the men involved could use with a little more self-protection mechanisms. Y’all deserve more consideration than I can give you.

We like having sex together with friends. It feels fun. It feels validating. It feels like having an adventure together. I think it is funny that my friends (whether conservative or liberal, Christian or atheist, monogamous or VERY POLY) and my therapist are all coming down hard on “Y’all are swingers and that’s ok.

Many of you were not the sorts of people to say that sort of thing when I first met you. I’d like to believe I’ve had a positive impact on you. I love you.

I love my relationship anarchist friends with all my heart. I can’t live like you. I think it is cool that you make the life and love and relationship choices you make. Go you. But I have to make the choices that make me ok and that make Noah ok.

We started out completely open. We have rocked back and forth on the pendulum trying to figure out what works for us from completely closed to “I can’t follow rules right now”.

I feel like a serious asshole, but it really did take the second time Noah completely broke down sobbing hysterically on the floor before I got it. I can’t date. Never again. I can’t have a boyfriend. It will rip him apart and I can’t do that.

Ok.

That is the deal. I needed to see that laid out plain as day.

We have friends who are happy to have sex with us together. If I need to individuate so badly (and I totally fucking do) maybe I need to do it in a way that respects this boundary for Noah.

I’m good at having sex with a friend and continuing to love them forever while having a 99.99% of the time platonic relationship. Even my platonic is effusively affectionate and supportive. I show up for my friends.

As long as everyone understands that if Noah needs me that is my first priority. Balancing my kids and Noah is weird sometimes. Early on when my children are infants they come first because triage of needs and all there is to a power struggle of importance. But frankly with six and eight year old children… Noah doesn’t have needs very often. When he does I tell the kids they have to wait. Yes, yes preservation of the species and all that…

Noah is the only person on this whole earth who is committed to taking care of meI’m not fucking with that.

I’m a needy thing. I can’t guarantee that my kids will take care of me. Barring his death or incapacitation… Noah will take care of me until I die. That’s the deal. Noah isn’t the sort to wander off if it gets hard. Noah isn’t a quitter. I started out hard. There have been no misrepresentations here implying I might be easy in any way.

I’m hard.

And he picks me over and over every day. Year after year. His intensity and commitment grow instead of diminishing.

I haven’t worn him out. Not in ten years of hard and shenanigans and fuckery.

I have a really good deal. It is a deal I want. It is a deal I like. It is a deal I appreciate.

There are limits within that deal.

It was really good and important to get to the point where Noah could actually admit out loud that he does not want polyamory at all, ever. That was important to hear. It’s important to document as a shift in what he wants. It’s important for my future behavior that I internalize what that means.

We aren’t looking for a unicorn. We aren’t looking to date. We are just the kind of friends who are fun to have sex with sometimes. Ok.

I need to internalize what that means. I need to figure out how to shift my behavior set so that I accurately signal what is on the table instead of leading people on.

We’ve hurt enough people this year. I hurt the Quiet One. We hurt our friend. I’m going to go ahead and be a shit and say that Noah hurt the out of state person.

Fuck. We did that. I’m sorry. There isn’t much I can do to fix any of it.

But I can move forward and try to figure out how to not do it again. You can’t always repair the damage you cause. Sometimes there are good reasons you can’t fix things with someone you have hurt or traumatized.

That doesn’t mean that you should pretend it didn’t happen. Acknowledge the pain you cause. Even if part of acknowledging it means stepping back and not inflicting your presence on people who don’t fucking want to deal with you.

That’s legit, yo.

People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. Thank you, Bailey.

Some people are in our lives so we can learn lessons. Sometimes that lesson is, “I’m an asshole who hurts people in ________ ways.” I feel really bad about the number of people who have been in my life to demonstrate to me that I am a disrespectful bully.

I’m sorry. I think I do better about that now than when I was younger. I’m still not perfect.

I’m not sure I will ever stop being a bully 100% of the time. That shit can be effective, yo. There are times in life when you need to be able to stand up and demand your way. Bullying behavior works very well. Like, when Noah was in the hospital and none of the nurses would take me seriously that he needed a non-Opioid medication. I had to all but throw a temper tantrum to get them to call a doctor and evaluate him. I don’t feel bad. I brought chocolates and apologized later.

They said they deal with worse all the time.

Life is funny.

Bullying is a complicated subject. We present it in school as “evil” and The Behavior To Avoid when the reality is that the world is full of bullying and being able to manage it is important. Sometimes bullying is not evil. A lot of really important stuff only gets done because there is a bully shoving everyone along.

It’s like manipulation. It gets a bad rap but I think there is some utility there.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to add anything else to this topic. Cheers.

Moving the needle

I’m trying to figure out how to get things to improve in my marriage. I’m tired. I’m sad. I’m scared. At this point we are most of the way through arguing about all of our done-me-wrongs over the last ten years. There’s been an absolute fuck ton of arguing this year.

I don’t know about you, but I have let a lot of things slide over ten years because I didn’t want to argue. Then when things kinda hit a boil… everything comes out. We’ve had little and big problems that I’ve bit my tongue and la-la-la ignored. I’m not so sure it was useful.

At some point last night I realized that we have fairly equivalent lists of “you did _____” for one another. So we have hit the point where we have fairly well hashed out the problems and we are getting to… we have to forgive to move on.

Fuck.

I both am and am not a forgiving person. There are lots of things that I don’t really forgive. Lots. Shit dude, I cut off my family. There are things I won’t forgive. But I don’t think Noah has done anything that heinous. Everything that has been hurtful has individually not been over my threshold, but collectively… oh that’s harder.

But I want him to forgive me. Damnit.

I did something, well said, something horribly awful this year. I screamed at Noah that I wished he would die. I didn’t mean it and in less than five minutes I was crying and apologizing and saying I wanted to take it back.

I don’t have a high horse for sitting on here. I don’t think I have been less hurtful than Noah. I have been differently hurtful at different times… but I have been a horrible person. I’m really not denying that.

If we are going to move forward we have to forgive.

Oh fuck.

One of the biggest problems we are dealing with isn’t really Noah’s fault but he’s done some awful things because of it. Me saying no. I don’t really speak up when things make me uncomfortable all that well. My early life taught me that life is uncomfortable. Full stop. Speaking up about it just means people punish you for not complying faster because my comfort is irrelevant.

This is creating problems. I have done a lot of things while feeling wildly uncomfortable because I don’t react to that feeling as if I have any right to be defended. So I put myself in situations where I don’t believe I can say no and I do it over and over.

Sex. Oh sex is a fucking mess. Well, our sex life has been better between us lately than it has been in years. Which is fascinating given how much we are fighting. I feel like everything is my fault. I’m not sure it is but I feel like it.

How are we going to learn to have boundaries around “us” as a collective instead of maintaining individual boundaries and I’m supposed to learn to speak up more, and earlier, when I’m uncomfortable? I really don’t know. Yes, unicorn hunting is hard but both of us completely flip out when the other goes off to play alone.

It is both of us.

I feel really ashamed of how strongly I react to Noah playing separately, which is kind of funny because his reaction isn’t… that much less intense. Not really. It feels like imminent death for both of us. So why do I need to feel ashamed of that feeling?

Because I feel like I’ve been exposed to poly for my entire adult life WHY HAVEN’T I MATURED PAST BEING AN INSECURE TWAT WAFFLE? It isn’t lack of effort or time. I just… I’m just so insecure that it’s ridiculous. It isn’t Noah’s fault, not even a little bit. If anything were going to make me feel secure it is Noah’s behavior in aggregate.

Yet here I am. Feeling like I really should jump off a bridge so that Noah has more space in his life to replace me with someone who is less of a colossal loser. He doesn’t want that. Not even a little. But it is very much how I feel. He… doesn’t feel that differently about me dating.

Why do I feel so ashamed of having the same feelings he has?

Because I believe I am supposed to feel supportive. I believe I am supposed to be willing to support him finding every scrap of happiness he can in this life. That’s what a good wife/partner would do.

I am not a good wife. I am small, selfish, insecure, and so very sad.

Do you know what is incredibly fucking complicated? The fact that… we don’t really have many platonic friends. If we are going to be controlling as fuck about one another, how do we handle the fact that we are mostly only friends with old lovers/play partners? It is hard. We both have a habit of acting like people on our side aren’t as threatening as people on the other persons side.

I was listing off the people I feel closest to… all of them I’ve been intimate with. I haven’t had SEX with all of them. But I’ve been intimate. I like crossing boundaries with people. I like bonding.

After this year I wouldn’t be surprised if none of our friends ever want to play or have sex with us again. Oh the drama.

Noah is right that I can’t ever have sexual contact with someone again without his consent. I ignored his no this year. I can’t do that again.

That’s a mistake I get to make once this lifetime.

Last night’s conversation hurt a lot. But I feel like we got closer to understanding, “I did x because y.”

We really are getting to the point where the only step left is forgiveness. If we want to move forward, and shit we are talking about another god damn kid, we have to forgive. What does that look like? What does that mean?

It means tearing up the tally marks for who has done what wrong to whom. That’s pretty scary.

I know I have behaved abusively in the last ten years. I believe there have been times when Noah has too. Should we be carefully keeping lists of documentation so that we can hurt each other as much as possible with these actions? Is this how abuse is normalized and tolerated and excused on a wide spread basis?

There are lots of kinds and types of abuse. Our marriage has not included the deal breakers I experienced early in my life. We both abuse in the ways we do rarely and only after a lot of pressure builds up that we haven’t figured out healthier ways to manage. Does that excuse it? No. I don’t know what to do.

Noah is right that in order to know what is going on with me, sometimes he has to listen to venom and sort through it for the truth. That really sucks. But there are a lot of things I just can’t talk about until I am so angry I am almost frothing at the mouth.

In arguments Noah keeps saying, “You knew it was hurting me and you wouldn’t stop.” But I have stopped. I stopped months ago. I have not continued leading people on in conversation. I’m not making promises I can’t keep with other people. I certainly haven’t been on a date recently. I did stop. I just didn’t stop on a dime the way he wanted me to. Something is going on currently that I feel will do a lot to decide how we move forward. If boundaries can be expressed in a way that actually supports our marriage going forward… that’s going to be a big deal. If I feel that it isn’t managed well…

I’m scared. I’m bitter. I’m frustrated and angry.

I work all the god damn time and I really don’t have much in my life that is about letting off steam. Most of my work demands that I project happiness and cheer whether I feel it or not. I don’t show my emotional range to my kids much because I don’t think it would be very fair. I’m a god damn roller coaster and they don’t need to be on the trip with me. So I shove my feelings in a box and I smile and I keep my voice pretty calm and level. Are there cracks in my armor? Sure. I’m not perfect. But my kids seem to genuinely not understand how upset I get and how often.

I am a very good liar.

I spend a lot of time hugging and snuggling when I would like to be shoving my head through a window. When I would like to be raging and crying and cutting myself up. I pretend that I enjoy being a loving mother instead.

How in the fuck am I supposed to learn to care about being uncomfortable when pretty much my whole life is set up around, “It doesn’t matter how you feel it matters how you support the people around you.”

I honestly don’t want as much physical contact with my kids as they want with me. It feels alienating and hurtful. Partly because I am so jealous I didn’t get it that I feel like I am going to burst into flames. My needs didn’t matter. Why in the mother fuck are yours so god damn important?

Why is everyone more important than me?

I’m supposed to make other people feel comfortable. It doesn’t matter if I’m sitting there thinking about the various pitfalls of ways to kill myself.

I don’t matter.

But Noah has built a life around how much I matter to him. I am seriously impressed with the amount of work he has put in to being a good partner. It’s a lot of why I feel he deserves someone better. Someone who can meet him halfway honestly instead of with a forced smile.

It isn’t that I don’t love Noah. It is that I spend so much time shoving down how uncomfortable I feel that there is often not room for authentic emotions near the surface. I have to have a layer of pretense over everything in order to cope.

This is how I have survived. This is how I have accomplished as much as I have. I pretend that how I feel doesn’t matter even a little bit, I put my head down, and I work.

A lot of my work is consciously projecting emotions I don’t feel: happiness, comfort, feeling secure. Because I am so good at pretending I feel these things I’m very good at helping other people feel this way. From what I understand from the people I weirdly interrogate: their feelings seem to be more authentic than mine.

Uhm I guess that’s good. I can pretend to be ok and help other people feel actually ok.

It all comes down to how I actually feel is irrelevant.

As a result I hurt and hurt and hurt and hurt.

It’s been a bad year in pretty much every way. Well, the cruise was lovely. We made promises for the next decade of our life that we need to figure out how to keep.

Otherwise 2016 has been overwhelmingly shitty. I’m so god damn over this remodel I could scream and never stop. Today they finish the initial drywall installation in the bathroom. They have finished the stucco outside. They will be here till January at least. We have a hearing in January and doing work communicating with the lawyer saps my will to live. It feels so mentally taxing and draining.

In retrospect… I’ve done an amount of work this year that I probably shouldn’t have been able to get done. I’m so tired.

I’m on the verge of collapse.

And I don’t really know what feeds me at this point. From where am I drawing energy? From the clear blue sky and I don’t god damn know how much longer I can continue.

I miss socializing. I miss my friends. I miss community. I don’t in any way shape or form have the ability to do more of it right now. Because as much as I get something back from that there is also a cost associated and right now I can’t pay.

We haven’t even been inviting people over to dinner much. I just can’t.

I have felt existentially lonely for a long time. The road trip was really hard in this way.

Noah desperately wants to be enough all by himself for me. But Noah has a lot on his plate. I can’t ask for any more of Noah. It isn’t fair or appropriate or ok. So I feel like I have spent a lot of time trying to make myself smaller. So that what Noah has to spare is enough.

I’m hurting so much.

I feel like a real schmuck in our conversations sometimes. I know he has made enormous leaps of progress in the past year since we’ve been back from the road trip. He is organized and efficient and he’s trying so god damn hard. The trouble is I have a back log of hurt and frustration and need and sadness and I don’t know how to deal with it. If I weren’t dealing with years of hurt… would this be enough? I don’t know. It is closer to enough than it ever has been before. But I don’t know how to evaluate it given how much I’m flailing.

I feel like I’m reaching the part where I’m genuinely in a family and I genuinely need to figure out the coping skills for forgiving and staying that other people have. I’ve never developed these skills. They have never been relevant to my life.

I need to stop making Noah cry. I don’t place it as a goal that I will feel happy. But I need to stop making Noah cry. Because Noah having a minimum bar of ok is more important than me being happy.

And this is how things fuck up. This is how I build up backlogs of things that hurt me until I explode. Because I don’t think I am important enough to deserve support on the smaller stuff. There is just so much that makes me uncomfortable that I really don’t believe I have the right to ask for consideration. It would be a job and not a fun one.

I’m not sure how forgiveness ties in to being able to respect or like myself. Can I forgive if I think I deserve the bad treatment? If I think it will never stop because it is just that I receive it?

My heart and my head and my stomach hurt. I feel physically sick and I don’t think it is illness. I think it is sadness. I think it is the feeling that I matter so fucking little. I feel worthless and pointless and stupid. I feel like I should die.

I feel like death is the only route to stop hurting. Life is pain.

Forgive. I have carved forgive on my body in more than one place because I feel like if there is a lesson I am supposed to learn in this lifetime it is how to forgive. But am I forgiving Noah or am I forgiving myself? I sorta feel like I will not ever be able to forgive anyone else, not really, until I forgive myself.

Forgive myself for being petty and weak and insecure and so very damaged by the experiences I’ve had. How do I forgive myself for not being whole when I have never been whole and I don’t really even understand what that might be like?

I feel so very sad. And my arms hurt like a motherfucker. I need to stop.

Sex and fucking up

I had a great chat yesterday. It made me think about a lot of how I’ve screwed up this year.

Sex is complicated. We have sex for so many reasons. For connection, intimacy, orgasms, bonding, feeling-not-alone-in-this-minute.

The thing is, that’s complicated. Why didn’t I pick Noah for every time I wanted sex this year? Because that’s complicated. Sometimes sex with a particular person is loaded with implications across your whole life you can’t handle and you want the ease of sex with someone else. Sometimes I wanted to feel like I still had the ability to connect with new people.

New people have been very instrumental to my survival. I get that it isn’t something that is a big deal to everyone. I know that lots of people have been safer in the known communities of their lives. I have survived by over and over again throwing myself backwards into the arms of strangers and just praying they would catch me. At this point it is no longer a survival mechanism but it is an ingrained habit. That’s complicated.

I don’t think I chased sex as self harm this round but I have certainly done so in the past. Sometimes the choice is, “Do I hurt myself in a known and predictable way because I don’t like myself very much or do I take the risk that this person will be nicer to me than I am able to be to myself or maybe they will hurt me more than I would hurt myself. Roll the dice.”

That’s a choice I’ve made many times in my life. If you haven’t had to deal with the cognitive load of poverty plus severe traumatization… you probably won’t understand. It will seem baffling to you that someone would make such a choice.

I’m glad you’ve never been there. That’s awesome for you.

I’ve been there a lot. I’m not there lately, but I have zero judgment for someone else finding themself in that position. It happens.

There have absolutely been nights when I’ve picked up a stranger and fucked them instead of hurting myself because I didn’t think I could stop until I put me in a hospital.

Was that a bad choice? I really don’t think so. I think I made the best choice I could given all the circumstances of my life in that moment.

It is hard to keep the larger picture in mind when you are judging one particular choice. Choices that were completely reasonable for me at different points in my life shouldn’t be judged the exact same way at this point in my life. I’m in different circumstances. I have different options.

To put it bluntly: I can have an emergency “weekend trip to relax” at this stage of my life. If I feel like I’m going to freak out and do something drastic… I can make it a very safe kind of drastic. Because I’m rich.

But that was literally not available to me before marriage.

Money. Money. Money.

If you have enough money, time, support, fill in the blank to have better options… who the fuck are you to judge someone doing the best they can!?

Get off your high horse.

But I’m really not in the same position as I once was.

How in the hell is any of my behavior this year justifiable? Hunh, hunh?

I’m not sure I can “justify” my behavior. I think I can explain it. I don’t think my explanations are “good enough” from many points of view and there’s not much I can do about that.

I learned things I needed to learn. I was able to find words for problems I wasn’t able to find words for until I processed all the way through some extreme emotions. I was able to change boundaries that were a big problem for me.

Could I have found a way to do it without freaking out and breaking a lot of rules?

Maybe. I tried. I failed.

I succeeded when I blew the boat up.

Things are going a lot better in a variety of ways. Was it worth the cost? Yes. To me. Was it to Noah? He’s still deciding. He’s still raw. That’s fair.

Sometimes we don’t do things to people and they hurt anyway. I didn’t go out and fuck people to hurt Noah. That’s not why it happened. We are all autonomous beings running our own stories and our behavior is not always about our partners. We have our own narrative running. It isn’t about you.

Even if we love you. Even if there could be negative consequences for you. We can’t make every single choice only about you. That’s not a way to be a person.

Would it be nice if our choices didn’t hurt you? Yes.

Yes.

I played a very careful line this year. I didn’t actually do stuff that was that risky to my life. I mostly went out and spent extra time with my friends. People who have been good to me for a long time. I had a tremendous amount of fun. It will help keep me warm for years to come. Was it worth the price I paid?

Probably. Does that mean I can do it like that again? No. I really can’t. It would break Noah.

What does that mean? Our relationship functions based on a lot of trust and mutual worship. If I kill that then I’m kinda destroying both of our reason to live. Whether or not I’m doing something at Noah… I need to pay attention to the impact. My life is completely intwined with him.

If I rock the boat he feels every wave. There is not a lot of separation there.

I’m not sure we will ever get to the point of being “polyamorous” even if we are allowed to discuss it in ten years. But it is ok to have sex with our friends sometimes if we do it together. Is that my ideal? I don’t know. I don’t think my ideal is more fair so I guess it will have to be ok.

There is no fair.

I get why we are both so possessive. I see the holes in both of us that we use one another to fill.

Sex with friends is different than the anonymous sex I also like. They scratch different itches. Sex with friends is safer and more predictable (not in a bad way). Anonymous sex allows me to feel like I am touching the core of connection between strangers. It is both intimate and distant in a way that feels like a spiritual practice to me. The trust and risk are intense rushes.

But my life is wrapped around Noah. So whether or not I’m doing something at him… he will feel it.

Noah doesn’t feel so awesome about my having sex with other people. He wants me to keep my worship at home. When we are having sex with other people together, that’s ok. That’s not scary or hard. Well, sometimes it is logistically hard or a position is hard or… but it’s not threatening in the same way. We are having an adventure together. No one is left to sit with their imagination and fear.

Noah really doesn’t want me to go off alone any more than I want him to. Seems fair. Annoying, but closer to fair than most things ever get.

Why annoying? Because I am selfish selfish selfish selfish selfish. A lot of the reason I have sex is for the orgasm and changing partners increases that like a motherfucker. Sigh.

No life is perfect.

(For the record: Noah has been working hard on this and has had a pretty fucking outstanding success recently. There’s an A for effort and result.)

I know he’s trying. I can see it. I don’t think it would be possible to look at Noah and not see that he is trying as hard as he possibly can for me.

I’m so annoying and hard.

He works far harder than anyone can ask for; that kind of effort is a freely given gift. I know how lucky I am. My physical and mental health issues have not been easy. But Noah considers my companionship worth the cost.

How in the hell did I end up here?

I auditioned hundreds of people and Noah won the part.

I think we are much better and more interesting together than we ever were apart.

I’m looking forward to pregnancy. I get so exhausted that our pace of life will utterly collapse. Yeah, yeah, pregnancy isn’t a disability yeah yeah pregnant women should carry on as if nothing was happening…

I can’t. Gestating is fucking hard in my body. Remodeling and resettling the house has to be complete by January. Next year I’m going to work on academics with my big kids, sit around, sleep, exercise, eat and go grocery shopping.

I’m probably not going to get much else done, to be honest. And that’ll continue for at least 3-6 months after the baby is born.

I’m toast. Breeding is hard.

I’ve completed the cycle and come out the far side more than once so I’m very aware of what it looks like for me.

I’m really excited about the possibility of a pregnancy where I am in much better physical shape to start with (hello marathon and half marathons, you have halo effect I still feel) and I have my IBS mostly under control and I can breathe through my nose. This will be a different experience. I’m also older. This will also be a medicalized experience (hiya bleed out problems) which is kinda terrifying for me.

All the feelings. And my back is giving me trouble. I need to finish this damn remodel. But bending over really kinda sucks.

I’ll get through it. Put a corset on and get your work done, woman.

It’s kinda funny how we all adapt to the tasks life puts in front of us. This art shit weighs on my soul. I really am more calm in my home because of the art work. It is so easy to ground in my house. When you are here you are really in a particular, individual place. That’s a big deal for me. In other peoples homes, in most of the homes I’ve ever lived in… they all kinda blend together. Sure the knick knacks and furniture are sorta different… but the white walls meet the white ceilings and I want to crawl under a table and cry.

No, it’s not rational.

I do not want a fancy “nice” bathroom that looks like it could be in a hotel somewhere. And I’m willing to pay a ridiculous amount of money for the experience I want to have. Every doctor I have wants me to take baths as often as I can. I spend time in my bathroom. I recycle the water too. To deal with my hippy guilt. (The internet tells me that epsom salts, baking soda, vinegar, and sugar are all fine for plants on a small scale so my bath water is fine  for my plants. Woo hoo.)

We’ve had a broken toilet for a long time. We’ve been using the grey water to flush the toilet. I’m thrilled that with the increased bath capacity of water I will also be able to use the water for more plants. I’ve always used some of it sometimes… but never for plants if someone has used shampoo or soap.

Why am I so tolerant of my friends having quirks or needing accommodation for their mental health needs? Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Uhm, err, just because I’m a nice person?

*cough*

Because I fucking obsess over what to do with my bath water. I got no stones to throw on people needing to do their thing.

Oh man. I’m going to go through a pregnancy in a bathtub big enough to roll over in. Oh the glory.

Spoiled rotten motherfucker.

I really like my house.

Did I mention I’m having candle holders permanently installed on the walls of the bathroom? And there are skylights above it?

The walls are going to be glittering scenes of autumn and winter. I’m working on them.

My house is a very particular place. I like it so much.

I need to clean it. But that’s a problem for a different day. It won’t be really cleaned until the remodel is done. Too much dust and dirt is being generated every day. Not worth a deep clean. I’ll probably splurge on professionals in January at the start of the pregnancy.

Then I’ll spend a year basking in my family. In 2016 I was supposed to learn how to love myself. I don’t know that I managed, exactly. But I’ll spend 2017 hanging out and letting my family love me. That’s… almost the same thing?

Today will be a Zen sorta day. Noah has a dentist appointment. I’m watching a neighbor’s child in the morning and walking them to school. It’s kinda funny. Then I get to come home and get the kids onto chores and academics while I work. I will have to find a way to do work that is right next to them so we can talk while they do their stuff. They always have questions, which is very appropriate.

Tonight we are going to trick or treat with friends we haven’t seen much in the year since we’ve been back from the road trip. We’ve been really bad friends this year. I’ve dropped everyone and everything on the floor for this remodel. And I do it when I’m doing the breeding thing too.

Uhm, I’m sorry. I will crawl out of a hole again in the future. I hope you still like me then.

But yes. Touching base with old friends. Longevity is a big deal for me. A dear woman I know is deeply associated with a phrase: “Friends come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.”

I’m really curious which threads are deep enough in the weave that I will know them for most of my life. I am made up of the people who know me. The people who carry my story with them when they go. I am made up of the people who sometimes ruefully think, “What would Krissy do?”

I am a creation in your mind as much as I am anything at all. And the fact that you think about me. That fact is enough to mean that even when I fuck up, I am maybe not beyond forgiveness.

Stay stay stay

So many feelings.

I’m up I’m down. I’m finding layers of peace. I’m still dysregulated and sensitive and whiny.

On the ride home yesterday I hit… an important piece, I think, around suicide and pain. I can kill myself if I am in so much physical pain that I will no longer have good days. I hold that right to be sacred. If I hit stage 4 cancer, I’m probably going to pick the day I go instead of letting fate decide.

But problems in my marriage aren’t like cancer. It is not inevitable that things will decline further until death. It’s not the same and I can’t act like it is. I spent a lot of time yesterday frantically wanting to end my life. Because I hurt. Because that is the well trod pathway my brain takes when it is in pain.

I can’t commit suicide over a problem in my marriage or a problem in my sex life. I am too big for that now. Maybe that would have been understandable at some point in my life. It isn’t now. I am too big.

I don’t mean I weigh a lot. That’s too literal. I mean metaphorically.

If I am in too much pain and I have to run away I have places to go. I have homes in the bay area that would take me in with no explanation needed. I could go to Oregon or Washington or Minnesota or Georgia and I’d find berth. No questions asked. Ok, they’d ask questions. But they’d ask questions after I got there because they care about me, not because they would gate keep based on whether or not my answers are good enough.

I am good enough.

That means that when I’m having problems… dying doesn’t need to be the answer. If I have to get away… I have options. I don’t need to die.

I’m rereading the speech I wrote when I performed a wedding. I am not being good at advocating for myself in my marriage. Not really. My second thought? Shit I rambled on too long about history and irrelevant shit. Good grief.

Hey, they asked their favorite teacher to officiate. They got a lecture.

Marriage is what you make of it. What kind of marriage do you want to have? One where you both hurt each other often as a lifestyle choice?

Not really.

It was really mean to come home from being gone for half a year and immediately leap into that much dating. Noah missed me and was faithful and that’s how I rewarded him. That sucks. There have also been a number of ways in which we haven’t managed to communicate well and I’m not always lying if we have different definitions. We are talking past each other but that isn’t the same as lying. And I’ve done a piss poor job of communicating the boundaries Noah wishes I had to people as I’ve gone off on adventures. That’s a huge problem. I know I need to fix that.

It is hard to talk about bdsm. It is hard to figure out how common sexual euphemisms like “first base” translate. If I have literally played like that with folks when I was in the quad when I was in high school… yeah I consider that first base. There were no genitals involved. No one was overtly sexy at all. Sometimes humans are just hella rough with other humans. That’s… ok.

I really did grow up brutalizing people for fun. The weird ass part is how many of those people still know me and have a good opinion of me.

No, kneeling on someones chest and laughing at them as they gasp for breath isn’t second base in my head.

I don’t know how this works for other people.

Punching for a few minutes on the thighs and the shoulders… doesn’t feel like sexuality. I mean yes? But no. But sorta. But not?

I did think I was being good and acting within the boundaries.

If I try that hard and I run into a place where you have a different definition that needs to be a conversation about definitions not an accusation of lying. I didn’t lie. I told you where I would set my boundaries, but apparently I didn’t define that well enough for you. That isn’t a lie. It is a failure to communicate. I came home and told you right away. There was no lying.

There also needs to be some room for “I expect I will do ____” and “Well I actually did _____.”

Between the two of us we need to figure that out because we’ve run afoul of it in both directions. That isn’t the same thing as lying either. Not when you did it and not when I did it and I’m being accused of lying up one side and down the other.

I have not ever said, “Oh I followed the rules” and then later you found out through dubious channels that I wasn’t doing so. That hasn’t happened. I said that I wanted to break rules and you found out in dubious ways. I think that’s different.

I’m the one telling you about every fuck up.

I’m not presenting them straightforwardly and simply. I am reacting with hostility when you challenge me on a variety of things.

I need to stop that.

I think I have had to get this angry to assert that I will not ever grit my teeth through sex again. Whatever I owed anyone on that score I have paid my debt many times over.

And I can’t even talk about what that means unless I talk about it in context of overall volition and other partners because I can’t just push back against Noah. I owe him too much. I don’t feel I have the right.

But I have managed to learn that I don’t owe Deity or Cupid or my submissive or or or or. I go when I want to and I don’t when I don’t. (Ok sometimes I don’t get to go when I want to but that’s different.)

This is so complicated and I need to go.

Layers

I know I make it sound like my sex life with Noah is awful and it isn’t. The vast majority of our sex together is terrific or I wouldn’t be so loyal. It’s just sometimes awful. And the sometimes is a significantly decreasing percentage of our sex life as the years pass.

But there are a bunch of layers to this.

I’ve been sustaining genital injuries during sex for over thirty years. I am no longer able to react to this moment when stuff like that is happening. I can’t. I get in the forever-place where this will never stop and I should just die to get away from it because nothing I can ever do will make people stop hurting me this way.

I do not pretend it is rational. I acknowledge that it is happening. Bodies aren’t rational.

Trauma living in the body is a well documented phenomena. If you don’t believe me you can do your own damn research. I’m satisfied.

I think there is some validity to “You’ve been safe for 10 years so you’ve finally been able to mature to about 13 and that means you are rebelling and individuating in asshole ways.”

I think there is validity to the point that was made last night: I had my first six months off from genital pain during sex during my lifetime on the roadtrip. There is the possibility that my body started to feel like, “Hey wait… maybe that doesn’t have to happen.

know it is happening much less. I only have two clear memories since I’ve been home from the roadtrip. So that’s way decreased frequency.

But if you look at dog training, intermittent reinforcement (negative or positive) is a much more effective teacher than constant reinforcement.

I’m fucking paranoid every time we have sex that this time is going to be another time and it takes me a while to unwind and get into sex and that’s hard for Noah. It makes it much more difficult to relax and get into anything.

The last date for slut month? Cancelled. Guess why? Illness in the Bonus Family and he is sick too.

I guess that’s… meant to be? Ha.

If I have to be monogamous, at least it is with Noah.

He’s a ridiculous amount of fun to have sex with. When I’m not paranoid I’m about to be a fleshlight.

(I have been feeling annoyed about the canceled/cancelled spelling distinction lately so I looked it up. Given that my audience spans countries where both spellings are valid I figure I will just go back and forth between the spellings forever. I don’t need to pick a side here.)

I suggested to Noah that for a while maybe he doesn’t initiate penetration at all until I verbally say “I’m ready.” This is going to be a stretch for both of us.

I think part of the reason I hide behind sex with new people is: it’s not hard to have boundaries with them. I can tell a new person “no” all day long. Once a relationship gets more complicated… my ability to say no kind of evaporates.

Hanging out with my kids full time is quite the adventure. I have to have boundaries with my closest people. But they aren’t sexual. I mean, the boundaries are brick wall clear and not ambiguous and I never have to wonder about how to enforce those kinds of boundaries. That’s the easy part.

I have placed an unfathomably unfair problem on Noah: I will not tell you no and you need to figure out how to not hurt me.

And I keep score. And I get bitter over the years.

Fuck I’m such a fucking bitch.