Category Archives: telling the story

fake it.

I worry about how much I worry about how I affect other people. I don’t work nearly as hard on being nice to my body. I pay a lot of attention to how my behavior impacts my kids. For a while now Shanna has had an occasional eye tic. It is a stress response. I feel that this is a sign that I am not behaving how I should.

It is hard having to pretend that I experience less stress than I do just because it hurts other people that I run so hot. Hot in the sense of high stress load.

I feel very guilty that I had kids because I wanted to have a relationship that was intense and all day every day. I wanted to have the company. I wanted to have to learn how to be nice. I wanted to learn what it means to teach people without shame and resentment. I want it still.

It feels like I created people just so I could perform a science experiment. That doesn’t seem like a nice thing to do. But I’m not sure that the reasons that other people have kids are “better”. I know that I feel guilty that I am not better. I am not fully arrived at behaving how I should for my kids. I don’t deserve them.

I tell myself that my kids are having a good childhood in the scheme of their species. I am nice to them. I do take care of them. They have a wide variety of healthy, good tasting food. They don’t get yelled at much. They have appropriate clothing for the weather. They are allowed to play all day almost every day. (By “allowed” I really mean “forced”.) They are given all the kisses and hugs they want every day. They are allowed to tell me to stop doing anything except for cleaning their bodies. And I don’t even do that much. Usually I default to “fine if you want to be dirty it is your body.” Once in a while the filth gets to be a bit much. And I’m fanatical about teeth care.

I’m doing “better” than I used to be able to do. But it really doesn’t matter. I need to be enough better to stop scaring my kids. If I am producing stress in my kids then my behavior is a problem. I am not behaving good enough. It’s not ok.

My kids should not have to watch me like a weather vane hoping to determine how difficult I will be to put up with that day. That’s not ok. That is a level of crazy I don’t get to inflict on them. I actually really appreciate that Shanna has such “tells”. She is not nearly old enough to talk to me about the stress she is feeling. But I can just look at her face and know whether I am “soft” enough. When she looks nervous I have to visibly calm down and retract the energy I am sending out into the room. It is hard to do. It is a very conscious decision to “look” like I am not angry or upset or anxious.

I can’t just decide to not feel angry or upset or anxious. I feel that way most of the time. I feel scared. I feel like everyone is going to be angry with me soon because I am going to break a rule and then they won’t want to know me any more. I am scared shitless my kids will grow up and not want to know me because I am such an asshole.

But I can’t act like I am having the feelings I am having. I have to fake it.

I saw a friend yesterday I don’t see much. Usually I contain my shit better. This time she saw me right after therapy. She got to see all the messy shame and crying because I don’t know to be “better” already. I feel pretty pathetic that I have been in therapy for almost three decades and I’m still crazy. I still spend a lot of my time shaking in fear. I still spend a lot of time hiding in dark rooms so I can sob uncontrollably. I hide it better. I keep it in a box better.

I fake it better.

Not well enough. My kids see the stress. It isn’t ok for my stress to impact them.

My shrink wants me to look for a meditation class to attend with my kids. I wish that such a thing would not involve a drive to Berkeley. I will look though. It is a good suggestion.

Shanna has been asking more questions about my mom. “Did your mom love you?” “What good things happened to you when you were a kid?” “What did your mom do that was so bad?”

I told her that I don’t actually know if my mom loved me or not. I think she did. I hope she did. I believe she loved me as well as she could and it is really hard when that isn’t enough. I wrack my brain trying to come up with positive stories. Sometimes I’m not sure if I’m just a whiny bitch and someone else would have been able to find a lot more joy in my childhood or if it was really bad enough that I should have trouble remembering anything positive. I tell her flat out that she isn’t going to know about the really bad stuff until she is an adult. I told her she doesn’t need to think of me that way.

I’m not always very rational about food so I talk about the food insecurity issues a lot. I feel relatively unashamed of them. The more I read about foster children the more I feel “ok” about having the food issues I have. They make sense in context.

I talk to Shanna about control. Like I ask her how she feels about being directed and forced to do what other people want during a specific period of time. I ask her how she would feel if she never got to pick what she was doing. I ask her how she would feel if she came home and ALL of her toys were gone. Stuff like that. I talk about how when I was a kid I felt very out of control so I controlled what I would put in my mouth.

I talk to her about how sad it is for me that I didn’t get to have any of these good foods when I was a kid. She pities me. I talk about the ways my body has problems because of the food I have eaten. My kids are very aware of nutrition and the things they need to eat. “You have to eat green stuff because it helps you poop!” We do talk about other aspects of nutrition but that is their favorite. Neither of my children have my constant-diarrhea problem (I am hoping this is because of lower stress). They instead are mildly prone to heading in the other direction so I repeat things I have learned from friends with constipation issues.

My shrink says I should answer every question and not dance around things. Well, she doesn’t think I should say I was raped until they are more like puberty age but she is less convinced I need to wait for the magic number of 18. We’ll see.

I cancelled park day for next week. Half of playgroup for next week cancelled. I won’t be sad if the other half cancels. Having five kid-social events in a two week period is too many for me.

I am doing too much. I can’t keep doing these 12+ hour work days. Social time counts as work time whether I like it or not.

I’m having a hard time with the balance of life thing. I have a lot of things I want done. I am having trouble with the fact that it takes a while to get all the things done. In order to put it in perspective I asked Noah about how many man-hours it takes to produce an iPhone for people to bitch about not working magically enough. He said probably in the neighborhood of 500 man-years not including factory work. That’s software/hardware design.

Stuff takes time. Not everything that can be done by a group of humans can be done by a singular human. No matter how much you want it. There just aren’t enough hours in a life. Figure out what you want to build and how you want to spend your time.

Sometimes Shanna asks me about my crying. I tell her that every body is different. When I feel too much emotion inside my body I cry no matter what the emotion is. Sometimes I’m happy; sometimes I’m sad; sometimes I’m angry; sometimes I’m frustrated. My body has just decided that all of these things come out as tears. Sometimes I am crying because bad things happened a long time ago and I was not allowed to cry then and my body needs to let go of that piece of being sad or scared so I’m doing it now. I’m safe now. It’s ok in my life now to just have feelings, so I do.

She gives me a lot of hugs. I am trying so hard not to turn her into a major source of emotional support. I don’t talk about specifics. I talk about how to be an adult and deal with the body you have. I’m very afraid of emotional incest. I know that it is a common “next generation” away from incest mistake.

I am an intensely overly sexualized person. More than that, I tend to not know how to be friends without sexualized touching. I have a lot of big needs that have gone unfilled for my entire life. I feel kind of desperately needy sometimes.

I can’t treat my kids like they are here for my support. I created these relationships because I need to learn how to give support, not because I think I can or should get much back. I’m here for the satisfaction of giving. I have to have the quiet glow that comes from a job well done. I am not going to get a lot else. Not from my kids. Well…. years of kisses and hugs. That’s nice. But at some point they will pull back and that has to be ok.

It is hard learning to be this kind of self-contained. It means I am talking to Noah a lot less about what is going on with me. I can’t breach the defenses at all. We don’t have time. What time we are together we mostly talk about his work and the basics of project stuff or kid stuff. I am very much hiding in the roles I created for myself. I don’t have room for my crazy there. I have to mostly take the crazy off-stage.

I can’t just make the crazy go away this way. But I can damn it up until I have a better space to deal with it. I had better let steam off once in a while or I will be sorry. Very sorry.

I woke up this morning dreaming about cutting. I don’t dream much any more. I rarely remember them at least. Not since I started pot. But this morning I woke up with my hand already moving along my other arm. I’m not sure where that came from. I stopped cutting my arms by early high school. I moved on to my legs because that was easier to hide.

My therapist wants me to go find more things to do as “self care” and I wake up wanting to cut. I do need more stress relief. That has always been my tool of serious self care. That is how I let the steam off. I go off in private and I make sure I am not anyone else’s problem. And I let myself feel how much I hurt all the time. But I have to hide it because it makes other people feel uncomfortable.

Fake it till you make it.

I’m not making it.

If I knew what I “needed” I would do whatever I had to go get it. I would do it. Even if it sucked. Really if you could arrange extra suck just for me that would make me feel better.

Sometimes it is hard knowing that the journey is the point. I am making it. I am nice to my kids and random people in restaurants and my neighbors when they aren’t being racist assholes. I only yell about things that need to be yelled about. Silence is consent. I am not going to leave people ambiguous about how I feel on some topics. Even if that means I’m not nice. If you have never upset anyone then you have never stood for anything.

I have nothing to lose at this stage.

Sometimes it is kind of weird knowing that Noah is the linchpin. All of the luxury and privilege of my life is based on his ability to earn money. I groom him like a friggin race horse. He has more than doubled, nearly tripled, his salary since we met. Because I’m pushy and I give him feedback on what he should or shouldn’t be doing. That’s kind of weird. We really are good for one another.

I’m having a lot of anxiety about spending all of the money Noah earns. I’m not looking forward to my end of year reckoning on Mint. I mean, in terms of petty cash we are higher than we were at the end of last year. We retired a lot of extra mortgage. But I did not save all that I wanted to save.

I kind of went nuts in the back yard instead. And this Texas trip isn’t cheap. I’m going to have to deal with my anxiety. I am fucking thrilled with my yard. Not a single dollar was wasted. I am ecstatic. The only thing between me and what I see in my head is a lot more work on my end. I’ll get there. It will be really pretty. But it is man-years ahead of me and that is sitting hard. It feels like I wasted the money because I didn’t finish the project and now it’s just kind of half-way and limbo sucks.

I do this. Don’t mind me.

At the end of the year I always feel like I am a bad person for spending money on things I wanted. I don’t deserve all the money I spend. I feel really bad that I am not more frugal with Noah’s money. I should make it spread farther. I should be saving more for the kids. I shouldn’t be so selfish.

But really… is building a playground in my back yard purely selfish? My anxiety yells at me that I shouldn’t be doing the work. I’m stupid for adding all the work.

But I want a pretty yard. I didn’t inherit one. I have to make it. Yeah, it will be back breaking work for a decade or so. Stop bitching and do the work. Don’t feel bitter you twit. This is a choice. Beauty doesn’t just happen automatically for most people. And most of what I want is stuff that wouldn’t have been in place anyway.

I’m just being a whiny bitch.

I’m thinking that there will be the Friday Funhouse version of Wonderland. I close my eyes and see kids running around in packs. I hear the laughter and shouting. I turn around and see grown ups playing games and talking and laughing.

I want the laughing so much. I want it so much I ache inside. Crying isn’t really the way to get people to feel good. Laughter doesn’t come from the places I dwell.

It is a little weird to me sometimes that my therapist knows so little about me. Ha. She continues to be shocked by how many people I know. People with as much trauma as me usually hide in their houses for the rest of their lives. They don’t go out and meet social group after social group. People like me usually can’t fake it well enough.

Am I faking it or am I “learning social skills”? I’m not sure they ever really feel natural for anyone.

One of the things I like the most about Noah is that he doesn’t flinch around me. I don’t scare him. I don’t intimidate him. I go back and forth between wanting my kids to have a similar level of toughness and knowing that it usually comes from trauma. And I just can’t traumatize them. I can’t.

Stop clenching your jaw, Krissy. Deep breaths. Whatever you are feeling is just a feeling. It will pass. This moment isn’t forever. You aren’t faking it. This is the process. The frustration is part of the process.

Time to stop typing.

Not proud.

4 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t feel proud of myself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She told me she forgives me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I still lost.

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

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

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

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

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

He didn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the point. It is all a game.

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

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

That is comforting and very disturbing.

more thinking. less err, tmi

4 Replies

I’ve been sitting here listening to The Coup more. It is nice that youtube has these automatic playlists so you can listen to a whole album. And have a screen open next to it with the lyrics at the same time. A lot easier to understand. Ok, Violet isn’t actually one of the best ones. But it made me think about relationship stuff.

(I’m trying to not think about my bits. Bear with me.)

Well, more accurately it made me think of when and how I have done drugs. I usually have done so because I saw no other way of making that person like me. I want people to like me. Not many people like me. When people talk very nastily about young kids who use drugs… I think education is the path. Not hostility.

I have tried a pretty fair variety of drugs. A lot of them I tried because I was in a situation where I was dependent on a man (I thought) and he said, “Here. Do this.” I’ve only gone after a few drugs for my own reasons.

I was thinking about that because I tried a different intake of medication today and apparently the cheeba chews do a lot more to deal with the stomach pain than smoking, vaporizing, or pills. I’ve tried all in the last two or three days. I tried a different kind this morning and I’m probably down from a 6 or so to maybe 3. But I also wrote at the same time and writing often relaxes me. Column A and Column B?

Anyway. I have been horribly uncomfortable in social situations my entire life. I am very aware that I am bad and that sooner or later people will figure it out and I will be punished/reprimanded. This is just how I go through life. Usually I slink away like a pathetic puppy never to be seen from again. It’s my cycle. I own that.

Is this actually me letting people have boundaries though? When someone puts up boundaries I take that as a sign to just leave. Obviously I am not wanted here.

Well, I don’t know that I always manage to avoid people forever. I don’t. I travel through a variety of communities. I have land-mine people in all of them. So this is about me and my issues.

Only if I try to go through all of the situations in my head… no. It isn’t always my fault. But I am often someone who triggers people to have strong feelings. They will then tell me those feelings are all my fault. They want to alleviate it. So I am told things like I must dedicate my life to a 12 step program (it is permissible for me to pick my own of course–obviously I have a wide variety of different options I could be eligible for–I am pretty crazy and all) or I am bad.

I don’t think that is about me. That is about someone else deciding “A Good (Mother/Person/I don’t fucking know) acts like _____________.” I never signed on for that role. I like to negotiate my own roles. I like to be able to say, “Am I allowed to ask for this, this, and this–it is ok to say no.” I don’t ask unless I am ok with no.

I am not trying to make other peoples lives harder. I do not write about my anxiety in order to create anxiety in other people. I write so that when I am done writing I can have a 2-6 sentence pitch that is calculated to make it sound appealing to my specific audience that I am talking to in person.

Have you ever noticed that I don’t talk nearly as much as I write? I am rehearsing. I am refining. If that process bothers you, well, don’t watch. I need to do this. And I have learned through long experience that I won’t write just for me. I stop. I get depressed. And then I spend a lot of time cutting. I don’t want to cut any more. I really can’t take the risk of not blogging at this stage of my life. This is rather important to my mental health.

I have to be selfish about this. I have to be selfish about my right to process my feelings in a public way. Blah blah me talking about my trauma will traumatize other people blah blah blah. Have you ever learned the variety of tricks for closing a computer screen? Bam. Problem solved.

Don’t silence me to make you feel better.

Yes, I’m making different choices than you. I go through a different thought process than you.

That doesn’t mean yours is bad. It just means that it belongs to you.

Recently someone told me I was weirdly permissive and authoritarian at the same time with my kids. I explained the permissive part by saying, “I am saving up my “no’s” for when they have boyfriends. If I can say yes I do.” But I am very authoritarian too. Mostly I effect this through modeling.

We spend a ridiculous amount of time practicing our “manners” and “nice talk”. “How do you introduce yourself?”

“How do you look for clues about a person that are a good introduction to conversation? What things must you not mention or people feel sensitive?” We look for examples in books and movies and games and take them apart. “How does this make you feel?”

Even when I am depressed and pathetic and lying on the couch my children get a lot of attention. They bring me books and we read endlessly. Well, or until my throat goes out. Then Shanna starts explaining/reading the books to me. Then Calli takes a turn. We talk about all of them.

Because I know that it doesn’t matter what is going on in my mind or my body I need to keep working on educating them. That is my job. That is what I am here to do. I am responsible. There is no one to whom I can pass the buck.

It keeps me honest.

I grew up in a house of people who rarely got up and did anything. They were all massively depressed. I didn’t learn how to do things until I was an adult. I know this is common in my generation. Latch key kids with a microwave don’t know how to actually survive.

My body actively rebels at eating “normal” food. I should not have any vegetables or fresh fruit while I am otherwise dealing with a terrible multi-day diarrhea outbreak but that’s all I have in the fucking house. (Well, I do have rice. But I think we are almost out of white rice. We do have a 50 lb bag of brown rice! Uhm.)

I don’t know what the happy medium will be for “healthy” in my body. I know that following the advice of “eat lots of vegetables and fruit!” is not actually going well for me. This hurts. This hurts. This hurts. It is distracting all the time.

I kind of wonder if ecstasy stopped working for me because I took too much of it (I didn’t have that much I know people who have had twenty or fifty times as much as I had in my whole life.) or because the trips became about pleasing other people. I was supposed to be entertaining. I wasn’t there because I wanted to be having an experience alone in my body. I was there to please someone else. It stopped having the ability to raise my serotonin. I just felt anxious and sad and like I knew I was going to be disappointing no matter what I did.

My birthday party was described by many people as “The weirdeest e trip ever.” Well, I knew going in to it that I was evil and bad for doing it. I had been told so quite explicitly by someone I loved.

I don’t know many people who can take a hit of ecstasy and still feel suicidal. But I’m special. At this point in my life there aren’t really drugs powerful enough to over ride my basic belief that people do not like me and I am bad.

Pot lets me not care. I feel more relaxed about it. It doesn’t take it away. I still know that I am bad. I still know that I am someone who does not deserve to be alive. But I’m apathetic and kind of tired and happy that I get to play with the two kindest and most wonderful people in the whole fucking world all day. Pot lets me stop and appreciate what I am doing this moment.

Even if no one else in the world values me, these two people do. I religiously keep my promises. I am fierce about my boundaries. I am loving and kind and gentle the vast majority of the time and I apologize when I am too rough. My kids are allowed to say, “Don’t glare at me. It makes me feel sad.”

I don’t like how tired edible pot makes me. It is much more extreme than smoking. I feel weak sometimes. I feel like I am swimming instead of walking. I am tense and fluid at the same time. I don’t like that I often don’t feel anything from a pill for over three hours. That means I have to wake up in the middle of the night and take a pill if I want my stomach to not hurt by breakfast time so that I can eat.

An old man in our neighborhood recently commented, “You’ve lived an awful lot of lives for someone so young.” I laughed.

I feel tired sometimes. I feel like I am not worthy. I feel like there is too much here.

I was talking to a mom at the park. She has many more kids than me. I asked if it was rude to ask her questions about how she manages. She laughed and told me it was ok. I asked a few generic ones. Then I said, “Based on what I’ve read it seems that a lot of what it is that you have to just do your best and trust to the grace of God to make up for the rest.” She laughed. Yeah. That. “This is my problem though–as an atheist I’m pretty much screwed.” She laughed at me some more. Yup. That must suck.

I don’t think there is a chance in this lifetime that i could forgive a so called “benevolent” god for what I have experienced.

It is kind of funny. I understand age of consent laws so much more now than I did when I was a child. I used to sit on men’s laps and say, “I know that you really aren’t supposed to fuck someone my age. But I promise I will never tell. No one cares what I do. My mother won’t even know.”

I did it a lot. To their credit most of them told me no. They understood that it was a crime for them to commit. I was lectured quite a bit sometimes. But then the ones who lectured me or yelled at me proceeded to ensure that there was a larger scale public shaming. Everyone should know that I am contemptible.

I can’t say I enjoyed most of the sex I had as a child. It hurt. But I knew I was “supposed” to do it. I thought it was supposed to hurt like that. I didn’t think sex could be comfortable or fun or nice. Well, maybe for someone else. Girls like me don’t work that way. I grew up just a little more and moved into a sub culture that taught me that “vanilla” girls enjoy being touched gently. Girls like me were masochists and that was way cooler anyway and the goal was always supposed to be to learn how to take more and more and more pain. More degradation. Give up more control of yourself. Become less of a self. Be just a servant. Be no more important than a piece of furniture, hell, sometimes you are the furniture.

I can’t isolate to deal with my social anxiety any more. Instead I have to pretend that I know how to be normal and have friends. I don’t know how I will deal with the fact that my life is a rotating cast of characters. People come and go and the only people you can depend on seeing are me and your dad and each other. The Godmamas have been very consistent for years. That is your next best shot. K has been in our lives for three years. Of course this means I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Same with Tay.

Pam comes and goes. I think that is good. I think she would find that she disagreed with more and more if she spent more time with me. I think she likes me more from far away.

I don’t have enough that is predictable for the kids. We do go to home school stuff. They will know those kids. But I will never be one of the people at every event. I can’t handle the driving. I feel bad about it, but it is what it is. Well, and I’m less willing to pay for things than some people. That’s ok too.

There is a rock climbing place walking distance from our house. I honestly think my kids are too young. But in a few years I bet we will start hanging out there a lot. If you have a kids membership you get a free adult in (one per kid) and I bet we will spend some time there. That would be fun.

I can’t predict the future. I doubt most of the people I know now will be in my life in twenty years. If I look at twenty years ago, when I was eleven, I think the last person standing is K from Lakeside. She occasionally reads my blog and we chat on IM sometimes. She is very busy. That is the only person left. I would not have predicted that she would be the one, let me tell you.

I don’t trust that people will want to know me that long.

Shanna talks about how we will need to add an upstairs apartment some day because she will need the down stairs for her family. I tell her, “We’ll see.” It is funny that when I first thought of having children I knew I would be the kind to boot them out the door at eighteen.

Now Shanna talks about wanting to be a firefighter two days a week and a doctor two days a week and I will be here to home school her kids. She will stay home two days a week because of course her kids need their mom too.

A permanent fucking dependent.

Once upon a time that was not a disgraceful thing. That was not a sign of being worthless. That was life for some people. Why are only some kinds of lives “worthy”?

I am not someone who could survive Wall Street. I couldn’t work there. I would scream and hysterically cry and have a panic attack when someone snapped at me because it would be just one god damn thing too many and it would be bad.

I am not saying that everyone there is bad or that having that kind of life is bad. I am saying I am not suited for it.

I’m also unlikely to ever really understand what it means to be Chinese. Or black. Or a man. I have to imagine. If I am imagining instead of experiencing I don’t get to treat them like they are equivalent experiences. My imagination is just a comfy place inside my mind. I access it in my garage. I’m safe.

I will never understand the feeling of walking down the street and having white women cower and clutch their purses. That would piss me right the fuck off. That would make me want to start a fight. I’m an angry person with a long list of done-me-wrongs.

I always only need one more thing.

This isn’t about anyone else. People cannot walk on egg shells. They have to hold their boundaries. They can step back. They can say, “In this piece of language _______ it sounds like you are kind of attacking. Can I ask for clarification on that?” I will of course say, “Ah. Poor choice of words. Let me attempt to reword. Is this better?”

Ok, maybe not of course. But I’ll try.

I like questions. I like people wanting to understand. I am not dealing well with people saying that I make them feel bad. I’m not trying to. Is there something very specific that you can ask about? No? Yes?

I am not ranting because I am mad at you. I’m ranting because very soon I have to put the mask on and act very polite and very normal and very controlled. For the love of all that is holy I have to stop crying. I need to clean up the four napkins full of snot and go get started on the day.

It doesn’t really matter how I feel. Shit will get done. That is how life works. I do not want to miss life. So I show up for the work.

And the storm passes.

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Yesterday I felt sad and drained by the suicidal ideation slowed down. In the afternoon I talked to one of my favorite men in the world. He helps me gain perspective on life. We talked about shame and pain and being a problem vs. having a problem. We talked about what it means to be trying to change. We talked about how very hard it is to change.

This friend has dealt with a lot of suicide. Three people in the last two years. Now his dad is talking suicide in the “threatening” sort of way. My friend called the police. He told his father that either his father start a) going to therapy, b) seeing a psychiatrist to discuss medication, and c) find some sort of peer support group that my friend will have his father declared incompetent and he will sue for guardianship. That’s kind of intense to hear from my friend.

I asked him how he feels about me talking about my suicidal ideation. He said, “Do you see a therapist?” Yes. “Do you see a doctor for medication?” Yes. “Do you have peer support?” Well… the support group didn’t work out but I have very close friends some of whom I speak to daily and I can call them in any crisis. “Then you ARE DOING what you are supposed to be doing. You are allowed to talk about how it is going.”

He pointed out that I’m not threatening to do it. I’m saying that I want to but know I can’t. I absolutely never fucking ever say, “If you (whoever) do/do not do ___________ then I will kill myself.”

That’s not the point. I don’t think that any one else needs to change what they are doing. I feel like a chicken shit for whining about being in pain. Isn’t every one in pain? Well, why do we act like everyone must suffer all the time? Why?

I don’t suffer all the time. I am in some kind of pain basically every minute of every day but I don’t think about it. I try to ignore it. That isn’t the focus of my life. I’m also breathing air and pumping blood and blinking my eyes and producing saliva. So what?

I don’t always have the standing-in-the-center-of-a-bunch-of-movie-screens feeling in my head. That just isn’t here today. Today it is pretty quiet upstairs. I wouldn’t say I feel “relaxed” but I have more or less decided that given how much I was screamed at today I’m not jumping through hoops to entertain my kids so I don’t have a lot to worry about.

I don’t have a big terrible anniversary looming. Not till October. I have Calli’s birthday and my birthday to get through before then.

Last night my therapist and I talked about my compulsive sexuality. She hasn’t had a lot of details outside of what is in the book. I’ve only been seeing her since October 2012. She has only known me as monogamously married. Hell, she thought we started monogamy at the beginning of the marriage. Snort.

No, actually not following the guy home from the grocery store is brand spanking new. For basically the first twenty-five years of my life I would have. I said yes all the time because saying no frequently resulted in my being raped and that process is pretty terrible so if a guy hints that he wants to have sex it is just a better idea in every way to say yes. Saying no is just flat dangerous.

I only want to be beaten when I ask nicely and say please. In any and all other circumstances I’m not ok with it.

My big girl came in to put her head on my chest while I type. Not a great angle for my arm. But gosh this is good for my heart.

I want to see what they are like as adults. I want to find out if they are going to be slutty or very monogamous. I don’t want to tell them to do either. I want to find out what they want for themselves.

My therapist asked me why I stopped being promiscuous. I told her I didn’t want to model it for my children. I don’t want to teach my kids that they should spend their entire lives hunting for sex. They can learn that lesson from someone else, not me. That’s not my role.

It is really fascinating listening to other people talk about their marriages and sex lives. I feel so grateful that I found someone who is extremely sexually compatible with me. I feel like that alignment isn’t actually common. This is why I test-drove so many people. Ha.

I should get dressed and water the yards and finish sanding the fence. Then I can bring some pencils over and start sketching. I bet I could get a lot of the layout done today and tomorrow if I tried hard. Then I would have next week while Shanna is in day camp to paint. I’ll have to think about how to entertain Calli. I’m not thrilled with the idea of just bringing the iPad but I might. She will have a hard time keeping herself busy without Shanna for three days. Stuff to ponder.

I was lying in bed the other night, crying–of course. I was thinking about how my entire life has involved crying myself to sleep while rehearsing all of the memories other people tell me to forget. Other people want me to pretend that my life never happened. They want me to swallow all of the poison down deep inside of me so that it is buried in the darkness of my belly. There they are safe from the poison. It only hurts me and that is not their problem.

I wonder if that is why my abdomen hurts. It is all the secrets I am not allowed to tell because they are too shameful. I eat them. I swallow the poison as fast as I can but it isn’t fast enough. I don’t do it completely enough. I am not able to do it while smiling and making other people feel good about themselves.

I am a failure.

I am supposed to take all of the suffering away from other people. It is not their responsibility to hurt. I should hurt.

But then I stop and think, “What a self absorbed stupid bitch.”

I haven’t spent more time crying about my friends miscarriages than they have. Who in the hell am I to think I am taking pain away from any one else? I don’t take anyones pain away. I wallow in my own.

I sit and wallow in shit and misery. Because I am too stupid to understand that I am in the pig pen. All I have to do is get up and climb over the fence and take a shower–right?

But this is the only home I’ve ever known.

My friend told me (and my therapist said she was so happy he told me this) I am changing my brain when I parent the way I do. I am creating the possibility of a different future for myself and my children. I am changing the pattern of my family.

My parents both had really bad childhoods. My mother cleaned up after her mother’s suicide attempts after school. My father had a violent, abusive alcoholic in the house. My mother was the youngest child and her older siblings were contemptuous and vicious to her. My father raped his sister.

What the hell happened to my grandparents that they would produce children who would act in such a way? One grandmother was the illegitimate daughter of a prostitute. One was the descendent of Mayflower Pilgrims. (My sister claims she saw records as a kid before my parents divorced.) One grandfather was a second generation immigrant born on a Mennonite colony. One grandfather was a Catholic printer from LA. His family had been in the printing business and in the military as long as anyone could remember.

For my children three our of four of their grandparents are mentally ill though I doubt my mother in law would like me saying so. My children have a great grandparent, grandparent, and uncle who have all committed suicide. They don’t need a parent too.

If I manage to have a happy sixtieth birthday that will be absolutely miraculous by the standards of my family.

And Noah would be really nice to me for all of the years in between. It’s nice to think about.

Good fear bad fear

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I was standing in line at the grocery store. The snooty-ass Whole Foods down the street from my friend’s house. I was there for ice cream and to kill time as I waited for my friend to finish something at the house.

I’m standing there be-bopping in my little world while I waited in line. It was a very slow line. I don’t even remember what song it was but my “under my breath” singing became uhm not so under my breath and the guy in front of me turned around.

I turned bright red and looked down and started fumbling awkwardly with my back pack so that I could avoid eye contact.

“Ah, so what flavor is for tonight?”

I jumped a few inches. I didn’t think he would actually talk to me.

“Vanilla! Always vanilla. Uhm, err and Sea Salt Caramel.”

“My friends swear by that brand, what do you think of it?”

“I don’t have an opinion. I usually buy from my local ice cream shop in Fremont, Loard’s. I’m visiting friends tonight. This is within walking distance of their house.”

“Oh. Do you get up to Oakland often?”

At this point I shifted my arms to place my big fat wedding ring on top of my pile of stuff. “Naw I usually stay close to home and family.”

“Oh.” He turned around and finished his transaction. He stopped to rebag his groceries into his personal carrying sack because he had been busy talking to me and had forgotten to give the cashier his bags.

I paid in cash, pocketed the money and left the building about as fast as I could. I went up the street walking at a rapid pace. He outdistanced me. He stopped just in front of me and looked like he was about to verbally engage me again.

I kind of shrank away. He looked sad. He turned and started walking up the hill significantly more quickly than I could–he was more than a foot taller than me and I am pretty ambling.

He didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t do anything wrong. It was an awkward mix of flattering and scary. I don’t want to be pursued ever again. I don’t want anyone to look at me as prey any more. It scares the ever loving shit out of me.

But I do want it. I do want people to think I am pretty. I do want to be desired. I do want to go sit on my Daddy’s lap and have him stroke my hair and call me Princess and grind me on his crotch. (I have this friend. He’s absolutely old enough to be my father. Really I have these three male friends and it’s very confusing and just go with it ok–my biological father is dead.)

I want these things. It is very confusing to read things about “rape recovery” because man it really presents a dim view of the idea of consensual bdsm. I feel like I don’t agree with the idea that just because I was raped there are whole classes of behavior I am now too tainted to engage in. There is a large and loud contingent in the bdsm community in general that wants people like me (crazy for short-hand PTSD and GAD for longer hand) to just opt-out.

Go be invisible. Fall out of the herd. Die.

That is the Darwinian message whether they intend it or not. That is what happens when fringe communities drift toward the mainstream.

It’s cool. I’m used to it.

I am gosh darn delighted to report that I’m starting to experience an uptick in libido. Last month was quite drought-like. Ha. I’m not actually entirely sure that directing my compulsive sexual outbursts into a monogamous relationship is entirely healthy either.

I’ve told Noah about some of the more extreme things I want to do. He is rather terrifyingly interested. The kinds of things you can’t write about in advance or people try to stop you. I’ll wait till my kids are adults–I promise.

I am what I was made. Is it ok for me to be? What is right and what is wrong? When I was sixteen I went to visit my mother’s life-long best friend over New Years. I remember her recounting a conversation she had in her Bible study class, “Oh goodness girl we get racy! You know, the Bible says that what a man and a woman do together within the bounds of Holy Matrimony is alright. It’s all good. You can go ahead. Have fun, sugar. But not until you are married.“ Death glare.

I spent a lot of my childhood thinking I would grow up and marry her son. I would do what he told me. I would obey. I would be his proper wife.

When I was twenty or twenty-one, I can’t remember which, I went to that guy’s wedding. I was with my Owner. We watched a wedding ceremony that was way more hardcore Dominant/submissive than our Owner/property contract. It was really pretty funny.

My Owner took responsibility for me like someone takes responsibility for a stray cat. He kept me safe and fed for a few years and he had some strict rules about behavior. It was all negotiated very specifically.

It managed my anxiety. I knew what I was good for. I knew what he wanted from me. I trolled his favorite hard core fetish pornography website to figure out what he wanted from me. I learned how to be what he wanted.

But it wasn’t me. I’m not an actual fetishist. I just want people to like me. I’m willing to do just about anything to feel like I deserve someone liking me. I have an intense need to feel pain. It is very easy to use bdsm as a reasonable source of satisfaction.

But what does being submissive mean? What does being a masochist mean? What does being a slave mean? Do these acts turn me on? Sometimes. Not a majority of the time. I err enjoy thinking about them a lot. My memories keep me warm alll winter.

When I was training for the marathon I enjoyed my little jaunt down memory lane. I ran past places I’ve had sex and thought about what might be happening with those guys. I have no idea. I hope they are well.

I was reading Wikipedia. Intrusive thoughts. That was what triggered this whole piece of writing. It’s very OCD focused and all sarcasm aside that’s not my set of issues. You know how much the “stereotypical guy” thinks about sex–right? A lot, constantly–something of that nature. It’s not true, but it’s kind of the attitude.

Outside of this whole “being with kids” thing I tend to think about sex obsessively and compulsively. Compartmentalization for the win! If you added up all the hours I have spent masturbating it probably stretches into a couple years of my life at this point. I like me.

It has been really abrupt and challenging to deal with having this split personality thing. I do not think about sex when my kids are around. That means I totally want to shove Noah into a sexless role because that is how I think about him right now. I’m not aggressively interested in sex yet. It’s starting to come back. I’ve had several years of very little sexual interest. This has been a very odd period for me.

But we still have a lot of sex. If we only have sex six times in a month that is drought-like. And I feel guilty and like I am not holding up my end of the bargain. We’ve only had one month where we had sex less than ten times and I felt really angry with myself the whole month that we only had sex six times. I just couldn’t god damn do it. If I had tried I would have hated him.

It is hard knowing that if I grow to hate him it wil be largely because I have not told him about small boundary incursions and then it will escalate into a large problem without him even knowing the storm is about to break. I don’t want to hate him. Hating him serves none of my life goals and would basically prevent most of the rest of them.

Sure, I could find new goals. More humble goals. But man that makes it sound like I like him because of money. It’s not money. Noah pays attention to me and encourages me. I have always written but I needed Noah to give me permission to write about the really dark stuff. I needed an Audience.

My Owner wouldn’t read stuff I wrote. My ex-fiancé wouldn’t read what I wrote. Puppy wouldn’t read anything I wrote. All of them told me, “People should be allowed to have private space to write about their feelings.” It was practically that exact wording from each of them.

I’m not sure I would be able to keep believing I deserve to exist if I didn’t live with someone with an ego the size of Texas. He is brash and self-assured and god damn full of himself and he’s completely sure he wants to spend his time with me. He tells me so over and over. He proves it through actions and patterns of work over long periods of time. He’s consistent. It’s really not about the money. The money is more a side effect.

I will always have a hard time remembering him raping me. He really enjoyed how much I did not enjoy that. He gets one. I agreed to one. I set those boundaries in advance. I didn’t try to say “safeword” or anything hokey like that. I fought him. That was really weird. I knew he wouldn’t stop. I knew that fighting him just antagonized him and made it worse. If I actually wanted a dead fish rape I could have had it. I just would have had to go limp. It was my own fucking fault it was so brutal.

It’s always my fault.

I write this knowing that people in the home school community will read it. People who were in my house today. People who are quite Christian. I’m not like you. Only I am.

I have heard my friends in the Leather community wonder if we should have some kind of “coming out day” like Gay Pride. I think that if I am in the closet to you it is because you have never actually looked at me. You instead chose to see a mirror of you and you ignored the shadowy parts where I was different.

We all have more similarities than differences. Whether you are talking to the prostitute or the investment banker or the gas station attendant or the flight attendant or the programmer or the sys admin or the house wife. It is said that if you look for the good in people you will find it. No, that’s not true. Abe Lincoln says that if you look for the bad you will find it. I’m ignoring him. I don’t like agreeing with people very much.

I think that if you want to get to know people and find commonalities and ways of getting along you can. There are stories about Auschwitz prisoners talking in a friendly manner with guards. I’ve read them in classes. Of course with my Swiss cheese memory I have no idea what the names were.

People can find ways to relate. The things that unite us are greater than the things that divide us. Blah blah.

I don’t believe it but I believe it is true enough in a pinch. I think that as a species we need to have a live and let live philosophy. The problem is how to handle perception of scarcity of resources?

Sex is a resource. There are a lot of people who are sad they aren’t getting any. Did random dude at the grocery store for sure want to get in my pants? Enh, It’s not 100%. But I have an extremely high success rate with this kind of scenario. I can generally get that kind of approach to result in sex within six hours.

Then I probably never speak to them again and eventually cannot remember their name. I have a vague dread of running into them but I’m cheerful and apologetic about not remembering names. They are only sometimes mad at me. Ha.

Guess what? Guys aren’t more ok with being used than girls are. Well, some are. Not mostly though; they get hurt feelings. This is why you can’t date/have sex with too many people in a given social group. You poison the well.

Love and affection and sex are different needs but we often try to meet them in a jumble. What you do when people don’t actually meet all of your needs? Go find someone else?

I get the general impression that if I worked harder on exercise I could sleep with an even more obscene number of people than I have already slept with. Four digits. Five digits. Why the hell not? All it takes is low standards and a willingness to ask–right?

I don’t think I would find any more self-esteem at the bottom of that well. It’s not like I’m doing the equivalent of being a born again virgin declaring fidelity to my man. I’m not made sanctified in my compulsive sexual acting out because of some fucking walrus in Nevada.

I have a lot of sex because it is what I am required to do. Not required by Noah–we don’t have that kind of relationship. This is what I feel I owe him. I somehow have arrived at this being part of the trade he gets for putting up with me.

Lately I have initiated sex because I was actually interested. And I got off. And it was only a little uncomfortable and not even painful. That’s fairly unusual these days. That whole combination doohickey. I have sex because that is the deal.

You get married and you are his whore. That’s the deal. You had better find someone you can handle whoring to.

That is what my mother taught me. Word for word. I bet you money she would deny ever saying it. I can’t forget. I remember and remember and remember and seal my lips. My daughters will not hear that from me. No Sir.

I don’t know the difference between wanting to feel like I am allowed to exist and wanting to have sex. Most of the validation for my existence has come through sex. Kind of pathetic, right?

Now I have these kids. It’s different. This incest shit will not go on to my children. They will be kept away from my whole family and aren’t all women in my position absolutely convinced that their partner would never do such a thing? All I know is my kids show absolutely no signs of abuse. I can cross my fingers and pray. Seriously–isn’t that how life works?

How do I ever trust anyone? How do I ever let go of fear enough to go to sleep at night? I lie in bed sometimes and can’t stop thinking about my father touching me. Intrusive memories. I’ve got ’em.

Just get over it. Just move on. I have increasing neuroscience on my side motherfucker. It’s not that easy. Trauma damages the brain. New instances of trauma layer on top of older layers in difficult to dissect patterns. In the scale of a lifetime I am getting over it; I am moving on. It’s just not as quick or as silent as you would apparently hope.

I’m still existing. I’m still talking and talking and people only have to listen if they want to.

I’m only really writing for my Audience. He’s read everything I have written since the age of twenty. Well, not all of my school papers. Only the ones I put on the internet. I can’t say all of the things I wrote in this post to him. He’ll get all conversational off-roady on me and we’ll talk about something else. I want him to see this. I want him to be part of this struggle. This is his sex life too. I want monogamy because I want a partner who is very invested in helping me figure my shit out. Me not figuring my shit out means big dips in your sex life.

I married someone who thinks nothing of taking NLP, hypnosis, and cooking classes to meet chicks.

What I need most in this lifetime is for someone to love me and believe that it is not only permissible for me to change it is required. I want to be loved by being encouraged to grow. I want to be loved by being taken care of. I have a provider, let’s be clear here. It’s a fairly primitive sort of gratitude.

What trade does anyone make in relationships? The pleasure of one anothers company? What does that mean?

When I am around people I feel uncomfortable, anxious, and like people are going to start screaming at me pretty much all of the time. Apparently I cause other people to feel like this as well because they comment on being afraid I will yell at them regularly. Noah says I don’t yell very often. I suppose it’s all relative.

I still want to be around people. I understand that this is a kind of fear I have to learn to work through.

Rapists don’t make me feel more fear than random groups of people. Hanging out with predators makes me feel more comfortable. I know how to play that game. I know how to get through that scenario.

Learning how to tell the difference between “good” fear and “bad” fear has been the journey of my adulthood. I need companionship and community. I just need it. It’s a species-level need. I don’t need to feel fucking guilt about it. There are six billion fucking people on this planet and precious few of them truly want to be alone. I mean, people need alone time. That’s not what I mean.

I struggle with how to build friendships. There are all these rules about what you can discuss and when. I uhh don’t like following rules. A while back I was a rude fucking asshole with a friend as I pushed her to try and change her sexual boundaries with her husband for me. Not cool.

I think that being monogamous will keep me from shitting where I eat. Sexual monogamy means that I am not a threat. I can be a non-sexualized being to the people I meet. I don’t have to know or care about their sexual interest in me.

Only sometimes it appears whether I like it or not. Good fear. Bad fear. Move towards it. Move away from it.

How the fuck do people figure this out?

There’s a first time for everything.

1 Reply

NSFW.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Culture is complicated.

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

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

“Uhm… no.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I could see her panic response rise.

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

“It hurts, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like it?”

“Yes.”

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

“Not so much ma’am, not so much.”

“Then we are finally getting somewhere!”

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

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

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

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

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

“I want more.”

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

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

“Stop! Stop! Please stop.”

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

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

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

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

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

My ego: wanna stroke it?

5 Replies

I went out. To a munch at a bar. It was made clear to me that I could have gone home with at least three people. Apparently folks missed me. I was offered beatings and cuddles and kisses and bondage. I could really have an ego if I wanted one. It’s kind of mind boggling how I maintain such low self esteem.

I’ve been having a rabid argument on my ptsd support site today. Can someone “heal” while using drugs or must they be completely sober before the journey can begin. Discuss. I have strong views. I am not on AAs side.

I have been reading a lot more about men hating women. You know, stuff written by men. It’s like visiting crazy town. I think I understand a bit more about why they don’t like me though.

I’ve been reading about consensual incest because it occurs to me that if I am going to try and collect real stories and serious data I will have to be completely accepting of whatever I get. And people are going to have a very serious range of backgrounds.

Tonight, at the munch, as I was on my way out a woman asked me for advice on how to handle advances from men. How do you deflect attention you don’t want? What things do you say? How do you deal with them? I told her I have a nasty history of sexual assault so I’m not sure my advice is the best. And then I told the story about being humiliated on the beach.

So, years ago I was brought into an extended part of the Burning Man community. I participated in a particular local burn every month. I never went out to the playa–I’m not a dusty girl. The one year I bought a ticket I gave it to my friend Mo and ran off to marry Noah instead. That was the right choice.

Long before I married Noah, right after I left my Owner (I literally moved my stuff from my Owner’s house on a Thursday and left on Friday for my first camp out with the group) I went on my first date with someone and spent the weekend doing ecstasy and nitrous for the first time and drinking a rather lot of alcohol. In the first weekend I fucked six people. I liked that group a lot.

After I had been part of that group for a year or so there started to be increasing problems with men being overly aggressive with women. The burns had gotten more popular and it was held at a nude beach so things got heated. This was in the height of the tribe.net days. Oh I miss tribe. It was decided that there would be a workshop on how to deal with sexual advances.

The woman who ran it pulled me out in front of the group and identified me by name. In the next few minutes she said explicitly that it was possible to have boundaries without being a bitch like me.

So tonight when I was asked for advice on how to handle unwanted advances I had feelings. Mostly how I handle them now is by holding up my big shiny ring and saying, “Monogamous!”

But before that. What did I do?

First, think about it from the male point of view. He is experiencing chemistry with you. He is in an at least mildly heightened arousal. And men are socialized to know that if they don’t push aggressively for sex they probably won’t get any. Any sign of equivocation or hesitation is a signal that you are just hoping that he’ll try harder.

So you need to be very clear. Never apologize. Acknowledge and be polite. “I’m not hunting. I’m really not looking for anything but friends.” You don’t need to feel responsible if he gets butt-hurt. That’s part of his growing process. Everyone gets rejected sometimes. I have kind of a ridiculous success rate (err, historically) and I get rejected tons.

It’s ok for guys to ask. It’s ok to not be interested and just say no. Don’t apologize. Never apologize for not wanting to have sex with someone. It is not their right. It is not something they have a basic set of permissions to access.

It was hard tonight to figure out the right mix of behavior. I flirted. I flirted with people I have a very long history with (my wonderful Daddy was there or I wouldn’t have gone) and I felt safe. I felt pretty and fun. I don’t feel fun very often. Usually I feel boring or bad. I kind of alternate between them.

I feel like my stories are all sad and full of woe. I feel like I am pathetic and uninteresting. When people ask me what I have been up to I know they only want the highlights so I go with: “Gardening and home schooling my kids and painting murals in my house.” That certainly isn’t lying. I don’t mention the book much. That’s a downer. WHICH IS WHY IT DOESN’T SELL. Silly girl. Ack.

But it was nice going out to the munch. It reminded me that there is a critical lack of mentor-like people who are without agendas in my community. My community is primarily a place where people go to hunt and hunt hard. There are monogamous people but they are kind of weird.

I think we are good for the community. I think it is good to understand that you can have boundaries and closeness. You don’t have to fuck everyone you love.

That’s kind of a weirdly intense thing for me. You don’t have to fuck everyone you love. I was supposed to fuck my brother. I was supposed to fuck my dad. But you don’t have to fuck everyone you love.

It’s ok to leave doors closed. I know this shouldn’t be epiphany territory. Maybe you aren’t compulsively sexual.

And also:

“Compulsivity model of hypersexuality

Compulsions are behaviors a person performs in order to reduce feelings of anxiety or tension. According to this explanation of hypersexuality, persons engage in whatever sexual behavior in order to reduce feelings of tension, instead of to express sexual desire. Because engaging in the behavior can worsen the situation causing the tension, the person experiences a longer-term increase in tension, despite the shorter-term relief, resulting in a self-perpetuating cycle.”

Yeah, that’s me.

Part of the reason that I “rape easy” is because I have a lot of compassion specifically for men who are very frustrated by sexual rejection. I find the sex addicts. I understand why they feel like someone like me should exist. It was really intense for me when I read the Kushiel series. I have felt like I was required to take in the pain of other people since I was a small child. For a long time I felt like it was more or less my duty to make their lives better.

It doesn’t hurt me to have sex with lonely, frustrated men. And it makes them so happy. Don’t I owe them that happiness since it is so easy for me to give and they want it so badly?

It feels weird when people ask me for advice on how to handle men. What the fuck do I know? How to get raped over and over. Because I am stupid and I keep standing near dangerous people. I stand near them because they understand the game and for most of my life I needed to have someone acknowledge to me that the game existed. (I don’t mean you lost the game. That’s different.)

Life presents you with teachers in the right times and in the right places. I have learned from prostitutes and drag queens. I have learned from old leather fags and rednecks. I have learned from WASPs and the projects.

One of the most important bits is stay away from anyone who makes you nervous. That’s where I get hosed. The ones who make me nervous intrigue me. I’m stupid. Let me tell you the rapes were uninventive enough that I mourn for their other partners. They wouldn’t be fun to stand next to for long.

But I feel bad for them. Because they so obviously feel pain. I want to help. Codependent dumbass. I want to be liked. That was what was on offer.

It is nice knowing that I don’t have to hope anyone else will like me every again. I get to just exist. But how am I going to deal with advances? You don’t have to be a perfect ten in my community in order to be considered interesting–it’s an awesome community.

It is all so complicated. How does one develop an actual clear way of managing oneself? I can’t pretend I’m not hot (I totally am) just because not every person on the whole planet wants to have sex with me. But I have self esteem issues. (Not body issues exactly.)

I will say that it was kind of weird having people plot porn out on the table in front of me. Other than my recent foray into tumblr I don’t look at a lot of visual porn anymore. I stopped that when I stopped having partners who were aggressively interested in porn. I presume that Noah looks at porn occasionally but I know for a fact he doesn’t have time to do much of it.

I was reminded what world I was in. I was repulsed and comforted simultaneously. I will note that the people in the pictures represented a fabulous array of sizes, shapes, and skin tones.

Oh yeah. I forgot. People are really beautiful. I haven’t looked at them like this in a long time.

I think I will go out wearing red lipstick again. I liked the reaction. It was really nice not feeling invisible. And it was nice being with friends. And, let’s be honest, it was nice feeling like I could crook my little finger and disappear with any number of people.

Ok. I think my libido is starting to reappear. This life business is going to be interesting. Monogamy is a conscious choice for me. It is a decision I make over and over and over like I make the decision to stay married and I make the decision to not run away from home and take my kids and start over somewhere new. Not because Noah has done anything wrong–I’m just crazy.

Being in love is, in my opinion, largely a choice. I could choose to nurture resentment. Instead I choose to be grateful that I have an exceptionally giving partner and I know I won’t find better. Sure, I could find someone to fuck me or hit me… Noah loves me. Noah loves me enough to give me his name and his babies and all of his spare time and mountains of money and all of the property he didn’t have to share because it was from an inheritance.

Should money matter? Enh, it’s not the money. If I left I would leave with little more than the clothes on my back and I would laugh at his attempts to give me money. I wouldn’t starve my kids but I’d get independent real fast and I’d stop cashing checks. I’m like that.

It’s the trust. It’s the commitment to making me safe. It’s the commitment for seriously investing in me.

Whoa. Holy fucking shit. How did I inspire that? I know that people get married all the time. I’ve spent enough time on the internet reading about dysfunctional relationships to understand how good I have it. Noah is probably glad that I no longer troll single parenting forums obsessively reading threads like “What do you wish you had known before you negotiated for custody?”

Ok, I think the caffeine has worn off. I wanted to make sure I could drive home safely. Woof. Tomorrow will be interesting.

Usually when I get this little sleep it isn’t because I was having fun. I think I will be able to smile tomorrow. I will remember watching the very pretty women doing terrible things to one another and I’ll smile. No one will need to know why.

I asked my ex if he still had our slave contract.

3 Replies

He said yes. How nice of him. 😀 I really picked an awesome boyfriend.

Slave Contract

This contract is between T-, herein referred to as Master, and Krissy
Archer, herein referred to as Slave. This contract is being entered into in order
to specify the boundaries and desires of each party and to clearly state how they
want their life to be structured. It represents a purely consensual agreement
between the parties.

Section One: The Master’s Role

The Master’s accepts the responsibility of owning his Slave. The Master agrees
to care for the Slave, to arrange for the safety and well being of the Slave, for as
long as he owns the Slave. The master also accepts the commitment to treat the
Slave properly, to train the Slave, punish the Slave, love the Slave, and use the
Slave.

Section Two: The Slave’s Role

The Slave’s role under this agreement is to work to facilitate the life of her
Master. The Slave will also strive to continually improve herself, both in terms of
skills needed for her own life as well as skills that facilitate the Master’s life.

Section Three: Alteration of Contract

This contract may only be altered with the consent of both parties. In the event
of an alteration, the new contract will be drafted, and when adopted older
contracts will be void.

Section Four: Termination of Contract

This contract may only be terminated after both parties agree that irreconcilable
differences in the relationship have been reached. All avenues of recourse to
repair the relationship must be investigated fully to both parties satisfaction
before termination.

Section Five: Code of Conduct: Master

The Master will treat the Slave with respect and love at all times. The Master will
strive at all times to keep the Slave informed of the happenings in their lives and
to consider the effect upon the Slave. The Master reserves the right to arrange
surprises.

Section Five: Code of Conduct: Slave

The slave is to try to contribute positively to the relationship and submit to
commands as they are issued.

Section Six: Agreements between Master and Slave (Normal Protocol):

1. The Slave will do her best to behave in the spirit of her position when
specific guidance is not provided.

2. When the Master arrives at the home, the Slave will be waiting for him,
kneeling in the hall. The Master agrees to provide adequate warning of
arrival.

3. The Master agrees to request an accounting of the Slave’s duties for the
day. The Slave agrees to provide an honest accounting when requested.

4. The Slave is expected to maintain an adequate stocking of household
supplies and groceries.

5. The Slave is expected to maintain the home in a state of cleanliness. The
Slave is to report to the Master any items requiring attention or repair and
to maintain a list of the same.

6. The Slave is expected to launder the household’s clothing and linen. The
Slave is forbidden to store clothing or linens on the banister.

7. The Slave is expected to fetch the mail daily.

8. The Slave is forbidden from operating a vehicle door in the Master’s
presence.

Section Six: Agreements between Master and Slave (Strict Protocol):

1. The Slave will obey without hesitation when the Master commands.

2. The Slave will address the Master using “Sir” or “Master” at all times.

3. In the Master’s presence, the Slave will await permission to begin eating.

4. The Slave will request permission before leaving the Master’s presence.

5. The Slave is required to ask permission to use furniture.

6. When in public, the Slave will take care to ensure that the Master can
garner her attention whenever desired.

7. If the Slave needs to bring an issue to attention, she must request
permission to speak freely first.

Section Seven: Hard Limits

The following is a list of hard limits both Master and Slave agree upon. This
section may be added to or subtracted from upon the agreement of both Master
and Slave.

1. Scat play

2. Needle play

Section Eight: Slave’s Signature

By her signature below, the Slave agrees to carry out the terms of this contract to
the best of her ability at all times.

Signature: ______________________________________ Date: _______________

Section Nine: Master’s Signature

By his signature below, the Master agrees to carry out the terms of this contract
to the best of his ability at all times.

Signature: ______________________________________ Date: _______________

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I want to believe that most parents have vague expectations/hopes/dreams about how this process of parenting will go because then I don’t feel like an asshole. I don’t have hard core expectations of my kids like “You will grow up and be a lawyer” but for most of my life I kind of fantasized about stroking my little girl’s hair and helping her fall asleep. Cue birth of first daughter. From about three months of age little S has been slapping my hand and glaring at me if I stroked her hair. I feel a degree of sadness about this that is entirely out of proportion but there it is. Then I had C. She loves having her hair stroked. I’m so glad I had two daughters so I could spread out my expectations and not ask too much of either one of them individually.

We are off sugar. It doesn’t effect the kids but I’m also off caffeine and alcohol till Easter. I think that harm springs from excess. Moderation is very important in life–moderation in everything! Even moderation. Which means that I am bad at keeping things like sugar/alcohol/caffeine as a sometimes treat and they start creeping in more and more. So I periodically take a while off then I try to go slow when I start again. Then things get out of hand and I take a break. I’m not sure it is “ideal” but it is how I get through. My kids hate me. My husband isn’t too sure about me. Why did I make everyone else do it with me? Because sugar is literally a drug. If you look at studies of what it does to your brain it’s not a joke. I want my kids to grow up knowing that you have to consciously look at your consumption of things that are bad for you and take breaks. Your body needs them. It’s not about punishment. This is a big part of my food religion.

I am too mean and nasty to be a vegan. I honestly don’t care enough about animal rights to do it. I am, however, not a big fan of factory farming or most of our current system of producing goods. I’m not a vegetarian because my diet is not diverse enough to provide me the nutrients I honest to dawg need so I eat meat to fill in the gaps. It’s not a perfect system but it has obviously worked for many species for a long time. I don’t need perfect–I need to not be dead. And when I read things about how consumption of quinoa is probably going to contribute to the destruction of a Latin American country I can’t help but be reaffirmed in my belief that if it doesn’t grow within 100 miles of my home I probably shouldn’t eat it.

But that springs from my hubris. I live in Northern California. More food grows here than anywhere else. The only thing I would have to give up from my regular diet in order to eat entirely locally is bananas. Whoopie. Most of the people in the entire world can’t have my hubris.

Ok. So my food religion doesn’t actually scale. Or make sense at all for large populations. If you look at pretty much every religion of every kind I feel that way about it. They don’t scale. They make sense for whoever they make sense for and not at all for the rest of the world. That’s kind of how things work.

My food religion partially springs from the fact that I live in a place where this is possible. It is disgusting, ethically, to be completely aware of all of my resources and make different choices. In my entirely judgmental opinion. But I know almost no one who has my degree of resources in this area. So it gets trickier almost immediately.

Understanding what privilege means, what having money means, what having resources really means is this constant slow-dawning process for me. What things are actually secure for me and which things aren’t.

I have been participating in an incest support group. Next week is our last meeting. They aren’t a bad group of women but I can’t deal with a support group that far away. It takes too much of my life to participate. In order to spend six hours a month with them I have to spend $240 and spend eight hours driving in miserable traffic. I don’t get enough out of it to balance the cost. Not when I also have to arrange child care and deal with stress around that. My friend who has been watching them is quite sick. I don’t feel ok asking her for this as a permanent favor. She can’t truly commit to doing it and I don’t want to get into the situation of being mad at her because her body is doing what it is doing. That would make me a serious asshole.

I did that with my former housemate. I thought I was agreeing to a trade of work. But I had an expectation level that was higher than her body could provide. Not because she didn’t want to. Not because she wasn’t trying. Bodies betray us. And I was an asshole. So I lost my friend over it. I can’t keep doing that in my life. I will end up totally alone. So I can’t ask too much of anyone.

I also participate in an online ptsd support forum. That is, uhm, more at my participation level and spoon level. I can do it in my garage at 4am and not trouble anyone at all. It’s fucking great.

But both groups function to scare the ever loving shit out of me. Given my level of trauma I am unbelievably productive and functional. At least that is how it appears to my judgmental eye. That’s… kind of scary for me.

Am I just in a good period? Am I going to crash like they did? Many of them didn’t truly lose control of their lives until they were in their 40’s or 50’s. I’m not past falling yet. I was reading today about why a woman became homeless at 49. I’m not past that yet. I can’t lose vigilance.

I live with extreme mental illness. I have studied the field enough to be utterly confident that the devils chasing me are much larger than most people deal with. I’m able to put that mental illness in a box and study it from the outside. I’m able to see where my behavior is broken and just decide that I have to alter that pattern. The mental illness is still there but the behavior is corrected.

I’m able to consciously try and see from other peoples perspectives. It’s empathy. My shaman laughed at me and told me that I act autistic but I don’t know that he is right. I make a logical decision… sorta. But I’m acting from the ability to guess what someone in that position would want. I’m kind of mind reading. I’m going through my film rolodex in my head, “What do I know about this person. Play entire film of life in fast forward. Go.”

What would someone who had that life want? I fucking guarantee you it is different from what I want. From what the monsters in my head are screaming at me to do. Doing this is very tiring. If I don’t do this in full detail with each person as an individual I fall prey to stereotypes and then I offend the shit out of people so I have to be careful not to do that. Or to blatantly say, “So if I were to treat you like person of _______ group the answer would be _______ but obviously you’ve had personal life experience that differs from your group. What do you say?”

I’ve fallen into Pinterest since I ditched Facebook and Mothering. I still feel that is a good decision. But I’ve been a bit more bored. I’ve also been rewatching The West Wing during break time. It’s less diverting. And less connecting. But I’ve been thinking about me more. So who knows.

Winter will always be a fallow period for me. I think I’m actually categorically ok with the idea that as an animal I want to take some time off from my most tiring work in the winter when my body aches and I’m stiff and uncomfortable all the god damn time.

So I was reading an article that was adamantly about Self-Reliance as opposed to Survivalist in nature and hanging my head in shame. I’m that kind of nutcase. I totally am. My uhh future planning is increasingly of the self-reliant nature. And travel. I want to root firmly then run away and know I can come back. It will always be here for me. I don’t know why I need to do this. I just do. I have to see things. I have to experience them myself. I don’t learn enough from reading about them.

I want to talk to people in a lower stakes environment. The thing that is hardest for me about my life is the degree of censoring what I say I have to do. Have I mentioned the extreme mental illness part?

My kids know that sometimes their mom is sad and cries. They know that a long time ago bad stuff happened but we are all safe now. They know we don’t have contact with my family because they are not nice people. That’s all they know.

I need to travel because I need to have the experience of being able to reinvent myself as new and interesting over and over. It is comfortable and safe. It makes me feel better about myself. I know how to do that. I have finally gotten good at it.

I have been thinking almost constantly about how I got good at that specifically because I was training myself for prostitution. When I first saw the movie Pretty Woman and Julia Roberts said something about how no little girl wants to grow up and do that I consciously thought, “Well I will charge more than you.”

I absolutely expected I would end up a prostitute until I was 19. Then I met a prostitute. One of the high charging kind. Ok, she wasn’t still a call girl by the time I met her. She was a pro domme. But she had done every kind of sex work there was and I ended up in her house over and over again. That sounds kind of funny. My boyfriend was best friends with her boyfriend and we visited them from out of state. So we had kind of an interesting relationship. Not exactly friends

She explained to me what was necessary for a girl to keep herself safe. She talked about a kind of trusting your instincts that I don’t have. I literally am not physically capable of doing what she talked about. I am specifically drawn to people who will damage me instead of people who will honor agreements.

That is a lot of why it has scared me so bad when Noah had done things that have pushed boundaries. Life is very scary. I am very dependent.

Those conversations with her are really why I never got into sex work. I was asked. I actually think that I gained so much weight because I was trying to avoid that fate. The last thing I wanted was to be attractive and stand near the people my boyfriend knew. As a fat girl I was invisible and left alone. I saw what happened to the thinner and more attractive women. I saw how they were rotated in and out of the community if they were bottoms. Only the tops survived.

I didn’t want to do that to people. So I got fat. Then I got out.

I’ve had a lot of time lately to think about my relationship with my body. I kind of wish I hadn’t let the doctors office weigh me. Going off sugar is letting me see my emotional pattern with regard to eating lately. If I’m hungry enough to eat some nuts then I do. Mostly I’ve just been eating a lot less and feeling fine.

Since I went to the doctor I’ve been eating a really lot. I thought I weighed more than ten pounds more than that and by golly before I go and see the bastard again I will weigh what I think I weigh. I will have the body I think I have.

It’s really kind of weird. I’m pretty afraid of being thin. I’ve been looking at my therapist and feeling twitchy lately. She is uhm a stones throw from my body. She is my body if I never had kids and I had exercised more starting earlier. So yeah. So I eat. And miss my old therapist who was a motherly alternating warm and stern black woman with a full figure and a rich laugh. When I was being stupid she called me on it. When I was doing well she was really enthusiastic and told me why I should feel good about myself.

I don’t have that kind of relationship with my current therapist. I don’t feel warm. I feel defensive. I feel like she is very agressive in pursuing her agenda. I’m having a hard time with therapist directed therapy. Ha.

I’ve been reading a lot of therapy comparison stuff lately and man are people against folks having a “paid friend”. I kind of think that is what I want. I miss Traci so much. I think Traci would be delighted with how my life is going.

I’m going to visit Dad soon. He has another new girlfriend. I was just getting to know the last one. I miss Francesca. I’m so sad that she doesn’t get to know my children. I think they would have filled a big void in her life. She had so much love to give. Grandkids who visited every other year? She would have been thrilled. She liked sending me presents every year as his “daughter”. My relationship was an entangled mess between both of them.

Traci was my therapist for seven years. She died of a heroin overdose just about five years ago. Francesca was Dad’s wife. I knew her from when I was nineteen. I met her long before they were married. Before they were even solidly together. She overdosed five years ago. Pain medication for cancer. She had gotten addicted while treating her mom. It looked like an accident. Kind of. But she was a recovered heroin addict.

Traci and Francesca were two of the people I looked to for a lot of support. They both died right around Shanna’s birth. I totally enmeshed with Shanna as a result in that first year. I tried reconciling with my family because I was lonely and needy. I paid for Conflict Mediation and was soundly manipulated.

I didn’t divorce my family until Uncle Bob died. Not until my sister asked me in a condescending voice if anyone close to me had ever died before. Because my brother and my father don’t count.

I feel like every relationship in my life has a shelf life. Brittney left at thirty years. Her family is angry about the book. Ok.

I look at Noah and my kids and I feel throat wrenching fear. I feel like I have a fifteen year year of reprieve and then oh holy hell what is going to happen to me? Sometimes I feel very ashamed that I “pull of normal” such that people are surprised at how broken I am. It’s complicated. I contribute to the invisibility of “people like me”. I feel a lot of pressure to maintain a specific front for the benefit of everyone but me. It feels invalidating all of the time.

Sometimes I just like staying home for a while. That way the level of censoring is automatic. We talk about what they want to talk about and it all works out. Other grown ups bring up topics. I spend a lot of time in my head. I have strong opinions loosely held. I’m ridiculously picky about how I am challenged though.

I’m starting to look at who is good at challenging me and getting me to actually change. That’s useful data for me to have. I like pushy people. Holy potato do I like me some pushy people. I combine that with requiring them to recognize specific “I’m done” signals and being willing to go with “Shiny Change Of Topic Please”. That’s a hard combination.

It’s kind of funny watching The West Wing. I have a lot of authority issues. I neither want to be the President nor serve anyone else. I don’t want responsibility for other people and I don’t want them to have responsibility for me. I want things exchanged to be gifts. But I’m really not into Burning Man. I think that is pretention not a gift economy. I need to travel. In other places they have gift economies. Yes, I will read about them before I go so I won’t be too gauche. I hope. I’m sure I will be. But I will be able to apologize for living in the native language.

I want to meet people who are nothing like me. I want to hear as many stories as I can hear. It is hard maintaining relationships with people who live near me. I feel afraid of the eventual brush off. I really need to travel.

I’ve been feeling a lot of guilt because the kind of travel I want is just not something Noah is interested in. And it will make this monogamy stuff more complicated. We also have stern agreements about celibacy. Complicated.

I’m dependent so I want to run away so I can prove that I’m not really in a cage. I am still free. Or some stupid shit like that. Or I want macro scale view on my country. I want to actually understand it better. And other countries. I want to talk to people. I need to. I need to hear their stories. I need to hear what life is like for other people. I need other models in my head. I need alternatives to what I know.

What I know isn’t good enough. I need to know more. I don’t learn as well from reading or from taking classes in school. I like talking to people. I want to know about them.

It feels like looking at the future destruction of my life. How far will I run? How many people will I hurt in the process?

I don’t know how I am going to balance everyones needs but I’m going to have to figure it out.

For a while there I was looking in the mirror a lot. I enjoyed watching my hair grow–I shit you not. I’m past that phase, mostly. Now when I look in the mirror I feel dismay at being untidy. But if I try to fix it I’ll make it worse; I promise. Curly hair is just like that. So I’m not looking at myself again.

And we come back to body issues. It’s just been that sort of week. I’ve been thinking. How am I going to wreck my life? My health? My relationships?

Participating on a ptsd support website and being in a support group for incest survivors is giving me a dizzying array of options to work with. Many/most of the issues being accidents because man do we not have control of our bodies. We just don’t.

I have a pretty ridiculous amount of control near as I can tell. I’m not sure why. I just do. I know that this role requires this behavior for this amount of time and you just fucking do it.

Two of my potential biggest supporters through this phase of my life were taken from me right at the beginning of the journey. I’m one quarter of the way through the expected time of specific duty. I’m doing ok. I’m trying to not be demanding or too taxing on any source of support but that balance often makes people feel unwanted or unappreciated or something.

I feel like I understand why I am taking winter off of people. I am not going out much. It is a good thing. Spring is coming. I have busy times coming. Lots of work to do. I won’t be able to sit around in my head. I want to seriously produce this year. I need to. I need to root. I have mother-in-law money set aside for it.

It will be fun.

Privilege. Responsibility. Curiosity. Sustainability. I don’t have any answers. I am, however, a wasteful American. I look at my habits and I think about what it will be like to live differently at this point.

I have been homeless. We lived in our car so I have not had the experience of living on the street. I have been sent to sleep on the floor or the couch in a series of homes of people I didn’t know. I was often not with family for extended periods. Given what I have read about attachment theory I cry for the child I was. No wonder I fucked everything that moved. Please, please love me. But I ran away right after the sex was over because I made sure that no one could leave me ever again.

Puppy did me a huge favor by being the only boyfriend I’ve ever had as an adult who has broken up with me. He wasn’t a good fit and he recognized it. He could have been more gracious–I’m just saying. But that needed severing and I’m glad he did. Things are certainly working out really well.

And breakfast is ready.

Homeschooling and hubris and motherhood is not a career

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I’ve had several prods recently to think about why we are homeschooling. Oh my goodness. The reasons are so many and varied. First and foremost we homeschool because I decided when I was seventeen that I wanted to homeschool my kids. Let’s be honest here.

Because I have always known that I wanted to homeschool my kids I got a BA in literature and a teaching credential and went to graduate school (no degree there). I wanted to feel like I knew enough. I desperately wanted to feel qualified. This is a fairly unusual route to take towards homeschooling. I have seen some mention in writing that “former teacher” is one of the fastest growing segments of the home schooling community. I don’t know if that is true or not. Even when I talk to other former-teachers they didn’t start out teaching in order to homeschool. They move to hoomeschooling because they feel their child needs something that isn’t otherwise available and they are trying to meet the needs of their family.

I have more hubris than that. I want my children to be unschooled while they are young. I want them to think learning is an amorphous non-linear process that happens in weird spurts and starts because that is how brains operate. Very few people really learn best lock step rote memorization. I live in California. I can promise you that lock step rote memorization is a big part of the educational philosophy. It’s the best way to baby-sit a bunch of potentially unruly kids.

When I was a teacher I handled unruly kids by giving them Legos and Play-Doh in class and I kept them after school for academic detention and we sat down and figured out where the holes in their knowledge was. Many of my teacher peers were quite frustrated with me. I was teaching these little brats that they get to run the show and demand an endless amount of my time and I should respect myself more than that.

No, I was teaching them that some people need to be physically moving in order to access their brain and that is ok. I was teaching them that some people take a little longer to pick up concepts and that is not shameful it is just something to accommodate.

I decided to homeschool my kids because my own public school experience was so overwhelmingly awful. I do understand that my children are not me and will have their own experiences–but big parts of the experience don’t change.

When you are bored in class you are expected to stare straight at the teacher and feign attention and not allow yourself to get distracted. You are not allowed to go actually learn anything–you have to pay attention to the teacher because (s)he is talking. Being in public school dramatically slowed down the rate at which I learned. I went in and out of twenty-five schools and really got to experience what it means to be educated in California. I wasn’t around long enough to experience much long-term benefit. Maybe if I had learned to feign boredom better I would have had a better experience.

My experiences outside of California involved me being beaten at least weekly and usually more like daily. My attitude sucks. I’m distracted. My handwriting is terrible. Obviously the best way to educate children is to make sure they are so afraid they cannot dare move or wiggle during class.

Regardless of the fact that I hear there are excellent teachers in the system (I’ve even seen a few) they are in the dramatic minority in my experience.

When I read people say, “I can’t make my kid learn anything so we can’t homeschool” I want to respond, “So your child is still lying prone in a crib somewhere unable to move or walk or talk or eat food or use the toilet?”

I make my kids be polite. Past that I don’t make them learn a whole lot. They learn how to clean up after themselves because I model it. I don’t force them. I talk about the process and why we engage in it. I did the work until my kids hit a level of competence where they wanted to do it for themselves and now I don’t do it. It’s great.

Shanna is counting higher and higher by the day. Occasionally I will correct one prononciation out of the 50+ numbers and she almost always skips one or two somewhere and I don’t say anything about that. Sometimes she makes it to seventy. She has almost entirely taught herself to read. She has actively rejected any vague attempts to help her. She wants me to read to her and not slow down to be didactic. It’s annoying. Ok.

My kids have high motivation to read. I spend many hours every day reading. I read books to them, books to myself, and the computer every day. I talk to them about what I am reading and why. Now that I am not on facebook or mothering.com at all I am spending about four hours out of every day reading actively-informational books/websites. I’m learning. I’m getting up and using what I learn. I’m talking about broad connections between different areas of our lives.

I’m not worried about my kids learning math. I’m about to get up the courage to build a big play structure in the back yard because that is the only way to get a slide to our property. I have all the technical knowledge for how to do this. I have a next door neighbor who owns all the equipment and is happy to help me for a few hours as I get started–the rest I will do with my kids. They really do help.

I talk about geometry and force. I will talk about why you need cross-braces under the platform. I will talk about distribution of weight (a frequent topic in this house anyway) and I will talk about the benefits of screws and nails and I will talk about treated and untreated wood. It will be an edu-tainment because they will always know that they helped build it. That they are competent people who can just do stuff because that has always been true. That has simply been what they have done with all the days of their lives.

Can people do similar projects with their kids and go to public school at the same time? Sure. Of course. But your kid is spending 6+ hours a day having to stare forward with at least a faked expression of interest. Man. What a waste of a life.

I hear that time spent in school is really important. But I also hear that if you subtract for transition time, recess, and discipline there is somewhere between forty-five minutes and ninety minutes of actual honest-to-dawg instructions in a full day.

And on the socialization front–it has not been the norm in our species for children to spend all day every day locked in a room with twenty to thirty people their age and only their age for more than about one hundred and fifty years. I have not been convinced that this grand sociological experiment worked out the way folks hoped it would. I mean–I don’t think it is actively evil… mostly… but I get why people use it.

I so get why people don’t want to do what I am doing. I absolutely get that. This is hard. Trying to figure out what to go learn next so I can model learning is hard. It requires a specific way of thinking that is extremely high energy intensive. I feel very overwhelmed by how hard it is and I have reason to believe that this specific sort of thinking is much easier for me than it is for most people. That’s not a snooty statement–it’s what people have told me repeatedly and emphatically.

I specifically went through a lot of training so I could understand the real eventual goal of education. What does it really mean to expose children to information and expect them to become “educated”? I’ve tried as hard as I can and I’ve worked for more than ten years to find out what breadth and depth of knowledge is actually expected out in the world. Did I go out and actually learn all of it? No. But I have worked very hard to create a model in my head of how information flows. What knowledge leads to what. When you talk to extremely smart people–what got them started. Where did their passion begin? How were they exposed?

My kids may grow up to be a hairdresser and a burlesque dancer, respectively. They may grow up to be scientists or mathematicians. Or writers or carpenters. My kids will almost certainly know how to program–maybe they will just stay there. I don’t know. I don’t have a very accurate crystal ball.

But in homeschooling my children I am committing to expose them to the depth and breadth of life experiences. They need to find out what their options are. I feel that one of the potential worst experiences of the hubris involved in homeschooling is that in modeling so strongly one way of life–how will our children really understand how it is ok to live? They don’t need to grow up like me.

Other than having a kind of adorably off-beat sense of style they are both experiencing a life that is about as far from everything I knew as a life can be. They won’t want to grow up to be me. That is not only acceptable it is wonderful.

I have to teach them how to wonder and explore and how to evaluate if the consequences for being caught breaking a rule outweigh the awesomeness you will get if you break the rule.

Seriously–that’s one of the biggest life lessons I will consciously teach. There are a lot of rules in society. Some of them you can break basically penalty-free and some of them have catastrophic results. How do you decide which sets of only annoying penalties you want to put up with?

Everyone should teach their children that. That is part of the process of deciding how many homework assignments you can blow off and still get the grade you want.

That is what I don’t want. I don’t want my kids to care about working for a grade. Once you finish school they stop handing out those grades. It’s been hard to figure out if I am really learning or if I deserve to be allowed to speak on topics I have read about if I don’t have a degree proving I have read those books and gotten passing grades on the tests.

What is this fucking bullshit. Wake up America. Socrates did not have to pass a god damn written exam before he was allowed to teach. I’m just g-d sayin’.

Not that I’m Socrates–nothing of the sort. But this is a very weird very modern American invented way of thinking. It wasn’t long ago that most medical doctors never went to college. They apprenticed. Or they just read some books and started doing it.

That is what “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” partially means. It means thinking, “I want to do _____; ok what do I have to do to get there?” And then you independently educate yourself. We live in the era of the internet and free public libraries. There is no excuse for ignorance.

Well, that age old excuse “I don’t have time.” I… Yeah. I make the time. My life is about that time. I think it is very important. If other people do not do it do I care? No. But I agree with them that they probably shouldn’t homeschool. Which I never suggested or thought or tried to imply that they should but I am often defensively told why other people could never do it.

Here’s this: I believe you. But guess what? I can.

That’s the hubris. It’s a flat statement of competence. Ok, you may not be competent at this–I am. I am very good at it, in fact. So far. I don’t have a strong agenda for most of their lives. I have extremely strong backed-up-by-research opinions on why I absolutely do not want them in a formal schooling environment until after age ten or so and then I will listen to them. They will have options and I will be supportive. I want them to set their own educational goals. It’s not my life to lead.

But it is my job to teach them how to learn and how to actively work really hard towards creating new things in the world. I want them to think of themselves as Makers. I want them to believe that they are strong and smart and competent because they can point at things they had to struggle to make, but look they did it.

I don’t want my children to waste their childhood staring straight ahead in a class room. I want them to be out running for miles with me talking about the plants we see–which ones are edible and which ones are not. We pick up garbage in our neighborhood (I need to do this more often because I write about it and then feel guilty that I haven’t done it all that recently). My children are learning what the rest of their lives will look like. They are training to be an adult. When adults have time they have to fill it. My children are learning how to fill that time, fill that hole in life. How do you spend your days?

My children are basically never bored. If they are bored I say, “Excellent! Time to get dressed and go into the back yard!” We don’t stay bored long. There is always a long list of things to do. Keeping a home is work. Having a pretty yard is work. Getting to look at lovely flowers is work. Growing food is work. They participate and help and grow more competent constantly. They are learning fine motor coordination. We have so forking many tea parties it’s unbelievable. Sometimes like six a day. They move around the house. The children are almost entirely capable of making a real one by themselves.

By the time my eldest is six and the youngest is four I anticipate that they will be able to create nearly all of the food and set the table for a large group of people. They practice over and over. They handle more steps each time. They want to. Because if all the work is dumped on me they don’t get a tea party. I get tired. It tends to mean a third or fourth time making a mess in the kitchen in a day.

I need them to understand what it means to keep your workspace clear so that you can continue to work on it later. I need them to have an investment in that state of being. We all help clean up after all of us. We are a helpful family. I say that over and over. So they do it.

I feel like I spent my late teens and early twenties studying how to be a truly great governess. It was a specific course of study. At this point in time we are unschoolers. Not Radical Unschoolers. We have limits here. But I don’t introduce academic book work artificially. I do a lot of specifically educational speaking but it is as I narrate what I’m doing anyway. I’ve been doing exactly the same kind of speaking to my kids since the day they were born.

I have taught my kids how to drink from an open cup, how to use a toilet, how to get dressed. From the day they were born I have been talking to them about their surroundings and experiences all day every day.

A great many stay at home mothers have the experience that when their children are very young getting out of the house is often an unsurmountable task. They spend a lot of days just kind of stuck at home bound by nap schedules. I remodeled my house and did extensive gardening. I couldn’t really go anywhere and I was bored.

I have slowed down on the rate of home improvement in the last year. Instead we have been venturing out more and more into the homeschooling community. My kids will have friends. They will grow up running in a band of kids. They will have ups and downs and trials and tribulations. They won’t always have a good time. Good. That’s how life is supposed to work.

I really and truly understand the arguments against homeschooling. The one that has the most merit, in my opinion, is the notion that people like me are the ones with the passion to change the system. To that I say–maybe. But in the meantime my kids would suffer through years of what is the worst education ever offered in the history of my country. Oh dear G-d no. I know those standards well. I’ve taught them. They have very little to do with learning except in a round-about back-hand way.

Opting out is a position of ridiculous privilege. Having someone available with my work background and education is extremely unusual. I get that. Not everyone knows that they have to raise themselves as they raise their kids and that it will take a lot of time and a lot of not-formally-structured consistent time. We have a very consistent life but we don’t have much formal structure. We do not live by the clock much.

One of those hard facts of life is that my desire to homeschool my kids intersects with the fact that I have a rather lot of psychological problems. I have PTSD and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I experience depression and suicidal thoughts with great frequency and I have been a self mutilator since I was a young child.

Raising my children really and truly is the only way I can see forward to really raise myself. I’m trying to do so in a way that is off-screen for them. Time will tell if I am successful or not. It is hard having patience and giving myself room to be imperfect while still truly progressing forward at a rate of development that exceeds theirs. It’s… an experience. I don’t get the impression this is the standard approach to home schooling.

One of the best things about being an American is that you have the right to live a life of which other people disapprove. You’re just allowed. It’s in our Constitution. We have the right to pursue happiness. No one promised you’d get it–but you are allowed to pursue it. You are allowed to structure your life around pursuing happiness.

The way I see forward to maximize my lifetime happiness is to take this opportunity to appreciate the time I am privileged to have. Not everyone has this much time during the day. Most of the people who have the time during the day have worries that simply do not trouble my mind. That is a burden I do not share so I don’t get to judge how hard it is to carry. I’m a fucking lucky bitch.

I get to spend the next fifteen years playing and building and learning. Then I get to decide what I want to do when I grow up. This is part of why I do not think mothering is a career. Mothering is about learning how to see the world as an experience that must be past on. I know it is work but it is the work of life. It is the work of becoming a whole, individuated person.

I say this is the journey of mothering because it my journey as a mother. I do not know how it might be similar or different for fathers. I feel like I have had a profound life changing experience where I understand exactly how and why I am a product of the abuse I endured and I have had to consciously teach myself new behaviors at every stage of their development in order to appropriately parent them.

They keep changing the damn target on me. I get a handle on one kind of difficulty and then it changes and isn’t difficult any more. I see more and more of my control issues. I see more of my frustration and helplessness. I see more of my inability to control anything or anyone.

I’m sure there are other life experiences that teach similar types of humility but I don’t have experience with them and I’ve never even heard them spoken about in real life. When you are responsible for the 24/7 needs of a child for year after year after year it’s an endurance test. We were meant to raise children in communities. We were meant to have a grandparent living in the house who could walk the baby while mom rested some nights.

Right now I feel like mothering is the journey towards understanding your place in the scheme of things. Ok. In history I am daughter of _____ wife of Noah. Mother of Shanna and Calli. Sister of. Cousin of. I actually have a large family when you look at it all written down on paper.

And I can’t give them that community. It does not exist to them as a resource because of something that happened long before they were born and is not about them. That feels like an unfair burden. The result has been that I have cared for them mostly alone for years.

I get more help by the year. I trust more. I know that my children require a family to go to who would love and accept them no matter what so they visit their Godmamas. It’s kind of like a shared custody agreement. For the rest of their lives they will have had these years of being cared for by gentle, loving women. Both of whom have conflicting feelings about never having children of their own but it is highly unlikely they will. Life choices are complicated. And they love my daughters. They have extensively remodeled their guest room to be a kid room. It’s a really beautiful set up. They live in the mountains and they go for long hikes and learn about the flora and fauna of my childhood. They are only a few miles away from where I lived for most of my childhood, in the house where they all still live. I sometimes drive almost right past it. I do drive by other houses we used to live in. There are a bunch.

On the direction without the kids I drive a route past a former home and I sit and think really hard about how my life looked when I lived there. How old was I? Where did I go to school? How was my mother currently behaving?

I catalogue these things endlessly. It helps that we moved a lot so there are a lot of places to pull over for a think.

I have to think about what I was taught and unlearn it. I have to consciously go figure out what the correct response should have been. I have to say it to myself.

I have to. No one else is ever going to. No one else gives a shit. Not really. Not to the degree that a mother is supposed to care for her children.

Sometimes I think of things done right and I try to add them to my toolbox. My mother was not a complete fail. No one is.

This conscious choice of deciding who and what you want to be is the real work of motherhood. It is becoming the person you actually want to look at in the mirror. Does every woman have to become a mother in order to go through such change? Oh of course not. Don’t be silly. But motherhood is a slap in the face that can’t be ignored. There are mothers who choose to ignore this process. They neglect their kids. I don’t think they will be able to read four thousand words to get pissed off by me insulting them.

I’m not saying that there is anything terrible about daycare. There isn’t. But it isn’t what I want for my kids. I don’t want them to be peer centric. That is a specific lifestyle choice I don’t want to make. I don’t think it is wrong or bad, but I have a lot of privilege to decide and I don’t want to do that. I have never wanted to be separated from my young children.

I will be the one packing the suitcase when they are seventeen years and eleven months though. Not really. But I will start charging rent. And board. I’m serious. I am trying to train adults. If you are not able to be an adult then I have failed and we need to get moving on fixing this fast.

I can’t promise to always be available. I won’t promise to always take care of my kids. I have seen that go extremely badly. My entire life experience makes me absolutely gut level terrified of creating dependent adults. But I treat my babies and young children like they are totally dependent. The shift starts happening around puberty. Then they get to start deciding the course of their life. Until then it is my job to keep them safe and protect them. No one else will care as much as me. No one else will want it with the fierce intensity that I want it. My children will not be victimized as children.

You’d never know I was so paranoid if you met me in person. My children walk up to every single person they walk by and say, “Want to play?” or “Hi, my name is (name of the day). What’s yours?”

They are not sheltered. They are escorted. They talk to obviously on drugs people because those folks just live in our neighborhood and have to walk to get to the bus. I don’t mind. When Shanna snuck out every house on her route ratted on her. It was great. They made sure to tell me that she stayed on the side walk like she was supposed to. It was hilarious how they didn’t want me to get mad at her.

Kids are supposed to try to test the limits of their parents. That is the whole nature of their life experience. And parents are supposed to grow and change over and over and over and over as they define who and what they really are.

This is the work of every truly-lived-life. I obviously have strong specific philosophical roots. Only the examined life is worth living. Only that isn’t even it.

I need to have a safe place to grow up. I’ve never had it before. I understand that other people had it while they were children but I didn’t. I’m doing my work here, but give me a break. Yeah it takes a while. It’s hard. It hurts. Yes, it is a river of self-pity. Someone has to have pity for me. Even if it is only me.

I need to have the whole experience of a life that happens without terror and horror and shame and blame and guilt. I need it. I know it is selfish of me to keep my kids home so I can see theirs. I’m not trying to co-opt their life. I’m not forcing them to be like me. I’m educating them. In actually traditional ways instead of in the manner of the current fad in public education. I only feel a little guilt. I only feel that guilt because this is such a wonderful experience–of course I should be denying it to myself because I don’t deserve it. I should be trying to force them to be just like their age and location cohort. Gosh. Aren’t I terrible and selfish.

No life is without bumps or course corrections. No one is born a finished product. I knew before I got a fake high school diploma (in my opinion getting a high school diploma after three semesters of attendance is a joke) that I wanted my children to have a life that was more consistent with the lives I read about in books. Those people seemed to turn out better.

Maybe they are all right. Maybe the answer is that women shouldn’t be allowed to read. Before you know it they get ideas and they start thinking and then we get uppity women who don’t do what they are told.

The whole world might explode.

book review as timeline

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I’m reading this book Giving the Love That Heals by Harville Hendrix and Helen Lakelly Hunt. I have no idea why I need to say the names. Any who. I think that books like this could potentially be labeled with a full page in the front Dangerous for Incest Survivors. I’m just saying.

I’m getting to the parts where they go through the developmental stages that children go through. They detail the problems that come out of interruptions of the appropriate pattern. I really have lead a text book life. I really have tried hard to be good in exactly the ways I was taught.

Every so often I sit on the floor in my room and I think about all the events they have already missed. They are already that much more whole than me. I tick them off. My father teaching me to be silent and unresponsive while he penetrated my vagina. I wasn’t even allowed to cry. If I did I would be given a reason to cry.

My kids have already escaped that. They believe that someone hurting them is a good reason to say, “Stop right now. That hurts me.” I wasn’t allowed to. I was taught to be passive with anyone who was willing to hurt me sexually. I can be extremely aggressive as long as someone does not go for my cunt. Then I feel my arms lock in as tight as possible to my sides and my neck muscles completely lock. I can move my hands, but not my arms. I feel my voice box basically go limp. I can whisper, “Please, no. Stop. I don’t want this.”

It started when I was younger than Calli. Both of my children already know a freedom I can’t know. This book puts a lot of emphasis on understanding that your children are not you are not going to turn out much like you. Appropriate control and such as children age.

I am absolutely sure that my children will be different from me. They have a whole branch of genetics I don’t share. They are growing up with different stories in their heads. Different experiences in their lives.

My kids get two hours of “unsupervised” (I can hear everything they say and do but I don’t have visual contact and there is a closed door) time with the iPad every day. My therapist says this is an extremely good idea and I absolutely need to keep doing it.

I treat my therapists as a mixture of older sibling/parent who gives me permission to do what I want to do. Is this really an ok thing to want? Am I allowed to do this without being bad? My therapist thinks taking two hours of downtime in the middle of the day so that I can be patient and loving all the rest of the time is just necessary and will be fine. Till they break the iPad. Ha. They lose it if they start bouncing or kicking the walls.

I’m being evasive. I’m afraid the kids will interrupt and the next part of the book is weighing heavy on my heart. “7-12: The Stage of Concern”

They say you never get “past” the stage you were when you were wounded. Surely I have made some progress beyond Callidora’s current level of development. I think I show significantly more sophistication in how I go about getting my way. I haven’t bitten anyone in the face in a very long time.

I worry about when my kids each hit seven. I fear that I am reversing the minimizer/maximizer thing with each kid. I don’t know. I fear that I will go to extremes and be wrong in every way. I’ve been thinking about rape a lot.

Apparently Paul Nathan, the last person who raped me before I ran off from the community is back in town. I’m really grateful I was told. I have one birthday party on my radar and she has already specifically told me that he isn’t invited. Or the other guy who sexually assaulted me. She was quite thoughtful. I’m not sure I will play at the party anyway. I plan to bring food, talk, and cuddle with Noah. I don’t have a fucking thing to prove. So I feel no real desire to play in public right now.

Oh that’s defensive and asshole-ish. I have something to prove. I don’t have to do it just because other people want me to. I’ve been listening to P!nk a lot lately. I’m not here for your entertainment. It makes me think about clothing. I’ve always dressed like a fucking nun. Only in the end–the last two was I finally dressed in provocative clothing.

So what are my kids going to wear in life? Being covered sure as shit didn’t save me. Uncovering in what I was told was a “safe environment” wasn’t.

It is interesting looking at how I have learned to set boundaries. It’s been a slow and painful process. I’ve been a major asshole. How do I want that to work for my kids? How am I going to behave?

Shanna recently told me that when it comes time to go shopping that she wants to do all the picking. There will of course be some guidance whether that’s her favorite or not. She might not like owning a pair of jeans–but she wears them when we are playing in the mud. You have to learn how to accommodate the life you have instead of the life you wish you had.

We will have to negotiate money in advance. Then she can spend it how she wants. Ok. Sure. Why not? It’s going to be a gigantic pain in the ass, but that’s ok too.

It’s disconcerting to read parenting books–innocuous items and experience surges of vaginal pain. Original wounding indeed.

When I was in my early twenties I managed to find a leather dyke gynecologist to help me with vaginal pain problems. The first thing she did was tell me to start eating yogurt whether I liked it or not. Just do it. Experiment. You’ll like something. And she told me to get off Depo Provera because it’s terrible for women. It thins vaginal tissue in long-term use.

Then we got to the spiffy exam. She looked, said, “Hm. Hang on.” She got up and took off her gloves one by one, slowly. Her brow was furrowed. She adjusted how I was sitting. She got a clear speculum and a mirror and a flashlight. She showed me the inside of my cunt.

She asked me, “How young were you when it started?”

There is so much wealth of knowledge in a question like that. But I lacked the ability to gather resources from her. I didn’t know how.

So I am running into this problem where in order to process who I am as a separate individual I have to really understand the fundamental ways I will never have a reflection of me. It’s all normal and shit but I have a lot of additional strong feelings. Being broken in plain sight does things to you.

Why is everyone else just more intrinsically deserving of love than I was? Because when I think twelve. Twelve fucking assholes raped me I know I’m not counting all of that right. I generally don’t count guys who only forced me to give them blowjobs, no matter how violent it was. I don’t want to think of that count. I don’t like thinking about the neighbors who pee’ed with the door open and invited me in to “learn how to hold one” with that sly little grin.

Over and over. Neighborhood after neighborhood. It didn’t matter if they were stinking unwashed alcoholic drug addicts in a trailer park or the nice little Catholic family or the rich old bastard in the mountains. And more. I moved more than fifty times before I was eighteen. I saw a lot of neighborhoods. I don’t remember a lot of specifics of the times when I managed to startle but run off.

I was always asked. I said no as I got older. When I realized I could. The first few times I was told, “Come here. Touch it” I did it. Of fucking course I did. With my father ignoring such a command would have resulted in him hitting me in the head. My kids are pushy in ways I wouldn’t have been able to pull off. I would have been black and blue. And sometimes it is hard to read these fucking development books and understand why Noah and I both are over sensitive to the noise in some moods and not in others. If Noah is happy he goes along with them playing. If not he’s grumpy.

Me too. We are both a bit moody. I hear that’s allowed. We’ll see.

I think I should stop reading for today. I haven’t even gotten through all the ways in which I am supposedly stunted yet. That’s enough for one day. I’ll finish it. I am finding value in it. They are right–this is all shit that must be kept away from my children.

This is my problem.

I think I need to get back to some extremist argument against educational standardization book after this light and fucking fluffy parenting book. You know, something cheerful.

I’m sick. And I’m crying. The snot is a river. Like my self pity. On that note I am going to go find more to eat.

Storytelling and defensive rambling

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I have known that I wanted to have children and homeschool them from when I was a teenager. That was what I wanted from life. When you combine that driving urge with my compulsion towards promiscuous sex you have a high potential for problems. Not a guarantee–there are people with split custody who have plenty of spare time for dating but I actively chose not to take that path. Let me back up.

When my husband and I met we each had other primary partners. I was living with my boyfriend. I was no longer his slave at that point so he was just my boyfriend. I was rather clearly shopping for the reason to leave him. He and I had blunt conversations about the fact that I didn’t think we had a future because I wanted kids and marriage and he didn’t. So my days were numbered. We knew that before I asked to open the relationship and sleep with other people. Really he stopped sleeping with me right after that.

He was done too. He didn’t want to play with me any more. We had played to the utmost limits of what you can safely do to someone. You really can’t play harder than we did. He wanted to start over again. He wants the excitement of the new experience, not the sad resignation to more pain. Fair enough.

So I met my husband. I think he became interested in me because I wasn’t hunting for him but I was so clearly hunting and I was doing it awkwardly and blatantly in a way that was tailor made for him but I was trying for someone standing right next to him. That shit is catnip. The dude I was hunting for turned out to be spectacularly uninterested in me and that’s all good.

So I met my husband. And we dated for the last six months of my relationship with my ex-Owner. And things got progressively more serious because he really liked me but his primary was not in a position to want their relationship to change. But he wanted me to be a co-primary. Err, not so much. My husband was in a horrible motorcycle accident while we were dating. I broke up with my Owner during the period of recovery. I kind of realized that if this “other boyfriend” was so much more important to me than my former Owner-turned boyfriend then it was time to leave. Because I was spending all of my time dealing with accident recovery care or going out in the evenings hunting.

I was done. I didn’t want to use him as a crash pad so I broke up with him and moved out basically as soon as I could find a place six weeks later. He had been hoping we would remain roommates and friends and work out a house cleaning arrangement in exchange for rent. In other words I would still wait on him. Yeah. No. Time to leave.

I moved out. I was dating my husband (with no premonition he would ever become such–I was one of like four women he was dating) and I immediately started a relationship with Daddy J. I was one of many for him too.

I was speaking bluntly with these men about my desires. They were enthusiastically agreeing that it sounded like fun–sure let’s do that. I didn’t see any desire to change their lifestyle though. They both actively plotted how to ditch future children for events.

I broke up with my husband. I broke up with Daddy J a month later. In this period there were a variety of one or two or three week affairs with other men. Two or three proposed marriage by the fourth date.

I don’t think I’ve ever admitted that in public before. It’s kind of awkward. I watched this movie Jolene on Netflix instant streaming (I love this service) and I felt this kind of weird throw up in my mouth. Holy shit that was the alternative path. Seriously. I had that offered to me.

I wanted children. I wanted them badly. I flat out told people that when I had kids all overt sexual behavior would end. Their reaction to that decided most of whether I kept talking to them. It’s not about being in the closet–I’m really not in the closet but I don’t model behavior in front of my children that I feel ashamed of them repeating with friends.

Then I met Puppy. On paper he looked a lot like my former Owner (gun nut, bondage as sadism, strong Libertarian) but in practice he had very different issues. When I would pester him about relationship questions things usually ended with me trying to apologize for asking then fleeing the room to hide behind a closed door while he shouted at me and beat on the door. It’s probably a good thing he broke up with me as quickly as he did.

It’s bad to go through life asking each guy you meet if he wants to support a stay at home wife. It just is. Wanting sex is partially, at least on a biological level, about wanting to make babies. That’s how evolution works.

But as I was auditioning and rejecting these guys I went through college. I got a BA in English. I finished my course work early even though I skipped a semester or so in the middle because I always went double or more the full-time load. I finished my BA in 2003. I finished classes in March. I wasn’t sure what to do next and I wasn’t completely and totally convinced my relationship with my Owner was pointless yet (I hadn’t started sleeping with anyone else yet) so I started the masters program. Officially I started it because even if I went into teaching primary school I didn’t feel like I understood my subject well enough to deserve to teach it.

I missed a lot of school. When I was present I ignored my teachers by reading books in class. I knew I wouldn’t be in the school long enough for it to matter if I was polite to the teachers or not. I’m not here for your entertainment. I didn’t care about trying to fit in or learn social norms by the time I was about ten. I dropped out when I was sixteen after missing freshman year of high school.

It felt rather ironic that I wanted to go teach. I needed to learn more about literature. So I started graduate school. I decided mid-way through that semester that kids weren’t optional and I applied to the teaching credential program. I told my Owner. He said he didn’t think he was ready. That was the beginning of the end, really. He finally said it. I didn’t leave for a year but it was inevitable. I hated the therapist who got him to admit that. She blamed me for forcing a lot of things that I wasn’t forcing. I should at least appreciate that she got him to tell me the truth.

Fast forward. I broke up with Noah right in the middle of my year-long intensive teaching credential. What he wanted from me was too much work for too little reward with regards to my long-term goals. He wanted a lot of time and attention and to feel special but I was one of a harem.

I’m feeling quite guilty about how little sex I am up for this month. That’s the problem with this tracking business. I told people up front that I would not commit overt sexual behavior in front of my kids but I thought poly would remain on the table. I thought I would want to have that as an option.

Then I realized that poly has a very hurtful learning curve. It’s not a malice thing. Mistakes are part of life. I think that the stakes change when children are involved. If I am going to have to keep part of myself away from my husband in order to share it with someone else then that is a compartmentalization I have to keep alive all the time. It’s not a sometimes food. And I have to always have a part of my heart ready to accept him being inconsiderate in how he pursues partners. It is impossible to be fully considerate without making mistakes and learning from the process.

That’s life. The thing is… in order to do poly well you have to forgive for those mistakes. I don’t forgive. I carry around a tally list of done-me-wrongs. It’s not right. It’s not a positive attribute of mine but it allowed me to decide that it was worth pressing charges against my father so it’s not all bad either–ok?

Being a stay at home parent involves an enormous financial and career risk on the part of the person who stays home. It is risky in our culture to depend on someone. My husband works in an industry where people age out pretty young. He feels enormous stress to hurry up and be better than he is.

And I’m withholding what he has for stress relief. It feels like at the long end of this I should be absolutely a sex fiend–right? Sometimes I just don’t wanna. And that feels like a dereliction of duty. I’m not being pressured. He went to the gym rather than even ask. Footie jammies are a fairly universal “I’m not having sex soon” signal.

And instead I tell pointless stories to the internet. Because I want to be seen. Even though it’s not pretty. I need to tell the story as if someone has never heard any of it before. Even though I am afraid of being repetitive. It is ok to tell the story if I need to today.

I’ve been really sad lately. I have arranged to no longer fuck up my sleep schedule once a week. I think that will help. The vaporizer is… well. Doing this produces a different chemical reaction and I’m having a different and less useful effect. I suppose that what it is doing is reducing my anxiety but it is not elevating my mood. I don’t get “high” at all. I miss being high. It’s been over a week and man it is really feeling pretty awful. I’m crying a lot. And sleeping a lot during the day. Which is not great. The kids climb on me and whack my face. And they always decide that whatever they are eating for snack must be ground into the entire table cloth.

So. It feels like I have some kind of work to do. The vaporizer is a useful way to treat some set of problems but not all. The atypical depression characteristic of PTSD is usually a reaction of the body trying to regenerate after all the excessive chemical use. By chemical I mean things like adrenaline and oxytocin–all of those things involved in love and trauma and sex.

Life is long and really complicated. I need to believe that marriage is about building something that is greater than either of us could make on our own. I need to believe that we are choosing to become one thing that is acting for mutual good. Or I need to be protecting myself. This is a specific choice.

I don’t mean to end on this kind of note but breakfast is ready.

I am struggling with the need to protect my body from being responsible for needs I can’t meet. I feel brittle and defensive and unworthy. So unworthy.

But breakfast is on the table.

Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.

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When I was younger I was quite fond of the Davey Crockett movies Disney made. I always wondered how he knew he was right. I feel a lot of doubt. The funny thing is, being challenged takes a lot of that feeling away.

Why did I send my niece a mean, nasty letter? Because it was mean and nasty. I will slightly dispute the phrase abusive, but that’s about perception so I will only slightly dispute it and live with the fact that other people different opinions.

Do I get to defend me? That’s what it comes down to. Am I allowed to say, “No more.” Was it my niece’s fault? Of course not. She never did anything to me. I’m not holding her responsible for what happened to me. I’m not even holding her responsible for what happened to her. It isn’t her fault she was raped by a parent either.

But she wants to continue living with her abuser. She wants to continue normalizing the abuse and tolerating it. I don’t need to be mean to her to get away from her. It’s not a requirement. Maybe someone else could have figured out how to do it nicely.

I am a flawed and broken person. I am extremely violent. I am nasty and mean. I was taught to be that way. It was extensively modeled. Maybe someone better than me could have found a better way to handle it.

I am limited by being me.

Am I sure I was right in hurting my niece? I know I was not. Hurting her wasn’t the point and it didn’t make me happy.

Was I right in breaking contact with my family? Yes. Yes. Yes. Unless you believe large scale sexual abuse should be normalized there really isn’t an alternative view on this one.

I tried to stay with my family. Then I started finding out how many people my sister raped. And how they are all covering it up. Yeah, no. I can’t be part of that. No thanks. My kids deserve better.

I am absolutely certain that I am the best thing to come out of that family. Vain? Sure. Arrogant? Sure. I really am. I completely fucking am. And my kids are going to be distinctly better than I am. I am going to make sure my family can’t fuck them up.

My sister is a drug and alcohol dependent pedophile. My brother is drug and alcohol dependent and believes that if he ever had a daughter that would be bad because inevitably he would do things. My mother has not been able to have a stable relationship outside of our family (not even friendship) since I was a small child.

My aunt works like a dog into her 70’s. She supports her three grown, disabled children. One has Lupus. One is a paraplegic from a motorcycle accident. One is severely diabetic and learning disabled to the point where he hasn’t been very functional this lifetime. He has never truly lived independently. All of these kids are in their 50’s now. They still can’t function without their mommy.

Yeah, I don’t want my kids turning out like my family. I judge.

I judge the drinking and the drugs and the lying. I judge the refusal to do honest work. I judge the attitude of superiority that allows them to terrorize children. How broken do you have to be to feel like a big person by raping children?

I am absolutely sure beyond the shadow of a doubt that I was right in walking away from my family. But I still feel bad that they hurt more because of me. I never wanted to hurt them. I just wanted them to stop hurting me. I wanted to prevent them from ever hurting my kids.

I’m going to go to the Police station today. I spent yesterday talking with therapists and social workers and online support groups of people who have a lot of experience with domestic violence. It is an information only sort of report. I want to ensure that if something happens it is treated as an escalation not step one. That is all I want. Nothing should happen today except a paper trail. There is “nothing to report” only I want my local police to know I exist and that I have a long history of being terribly abused by my family and I’m not sure if they are capable of stopping.

It’s hard to judge these kinds of things until it is too late.

27 children die pretty much every week. They are killed by their parents for one reason or another. Family violence is endemic in this country. Given my story I have a much higher than usual chance of having things keep going. That’s just kind of how my life goes. It isn’t paranoia to explain my story in progress to people.

“I have not received any specific threats but they are absolutely smart enough that they wouldn’t. The last several times I have seen my sister there have been posturing maneuvers up to and including her threatening to beat me up while I was pregnant. She would do it too. I don’t want police to visit my family and “check up” or anything. I just want to know that if things start escalating I have a prayer of being believed and supported.”

Because I am going to walk into a police station in a few hours I don’t want to smoke. Which means I’m sitting with my anxiety this morning.

A while ago I read that anxiety is energy in the body that wants to be doing something but you are thwarted. I feel a lot better now that I’m in the count down to doing what I can do. I have a plan. It’s not a great one. It’s not an important one. I don’t expect anything to change because of my plan–not really. But I’ve still decided my course of action. Now I can just put my head down and keep moving. I have a plan.

My two little girls are next to me on the bed while I write. Since I’m not smoking I don’t need to freeze my ass off in the garage this morning. Instead I’m sitting in comfy warmth with cuddles.

My life isn’t what other people want. That’s ok. I don’t do things how other people do. That’s ok too. It is better than ok. It’s unavoidable. We aren’t going to all fall into Stepford line.

4.5 years into parenting I am a lot less sure about the right way to parent. I feel fairly certain that my specific doubts will increase instead of decreasing over time. I have to parent how it feels right to me. I know that I have very different needs and preferences than other people. Humans are weird like that.

I feel loved here in a way I have never been loved. Noah really doesn’t understand how nice he is to me. He underestimates it. Or maybe he just doesn’t really understand how nasty other people have been. He pays attention to me in ways that startle me.

Every single time I take my shirt off he comes to delighted attention. He is more alert than any teenage boy to the possibility of nudity. He is so happy and appreciative.

But it’s not just the sex. He makes me breakfast every day. He does dishes. He cleans. He plays with our kids and works hard to take a serious interest in them. He shows them how things work and reads to them and generally takes it seriously that if they are going to learn about things it has to come from us. So we interact with our kids like crazy and hope that a whole bunch sticks. I’ll be more methodical when they are older. For now I’m just showing them the world.

A friend came over recently and was relaying difficulty with her daughter in a store. It was kind of weird because I had this intense reaction about how I would treat the same situation. And I had this intense explosion in my chest when she was talking. Oh my god I would not handle it that way. But that’s not because I am better or right. It’s because I would freak out and start crying. It’s because I have a lot of time to kill I have luxuries that people who work don’t have. I can tell the kids at the door to the store, “Either you behave or we are turning around and going home.” My kids think the store is an outing. I can go back for many days in a row until they are willing to behave to my satisfaction. People with jobs just can’t do that. You have to buy food–right?

I don’t think I am right because I have the Right Answer. I think I am right for me because I have paid a lot of attention to how I handle things over the years. I know my limitations. I know what things will cause me to start completely losing my shit. I work around them. It has been a long defining process.

I have “so much self control” because I carefully choose what I expose myself to.

Yes, I was mean to my family. Yes, my niece is a lot younger than me so I suppose I have an obligation to be nicer to her than to the people who are older than me.

I have no choice but to live with it. I think I will do ok at that. I’m sure I was right. There were no good choices. I had no good options. I believe I inflicted as little damage as possible. Oh believe me I could have been nastier.

Even though I hurt people I tend to hurt them in calculated ways. I protect myself–sometimes in ways that do not place other people as more important than me. I have to live with that. I don’t think it will be that hard.

I am not in denial about hurting people. I try hard not to do it randomly. I try hard not to do it indiscriminately. I will defend myself though. If there is collateral damage–oh well. I can’t always save everyone else from the consequences of their actions.

I guess that means my family found my blog.

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Hello anonymous comments shaming me for not playing the game right.

I didn’t walk away from my family exclusively because of my mom. I didn’t divorce my niece or nephew or aunt because of my mom.

My sister is a pedophile. My mother covers for her. That’s enough for me. If you think that I am wrong for keeping a pedophile out of my life, or someone who has actively covered for multiple fucking pedophiles, well then… we have no common ground.

I feel enormous guilt for kicking my niece out of my life. I know it’s a shitty thing to do. I left her to carry the whole abusive raft on her own. My nephew won’t work enough to keep a place to live. My sister hasn’t worked in years because she has enormous psychological issues (no shit). My mom hasn’t worked in years–I presume she is waiting for my father’s social security.

They wanted me for money. I’m not interested in being that for them. I don’t make any. I have no fucking money of my own. They would love to drain my husband dry. That’s family, right?

No. I was told from when I was a little girl that I would be responsible for taking care of my family when I grew up.

Now my not even 21 year old niece works at In-n-Out and sells Mary Kay cosmetics because that is the income in the house.

I didn’t walk away from her because she has a relationship with my mother. I walked away from her because as long as she buys into the idea that she has to carry the whole broken family she is going to fail. It is inevitable. I only hope she doesn’t have kids because her mom is a sick and scary person.

Yes, I’m a selfish fucking asshole. I divorced my whole family along with the problem people because the whole system creates a safe haven for abusers.

I just can’t be part of it. If that hurts my feelings or their feelings, oh well. We are all grown ups now. We are all making active choices. I’m allowed to dislike the choices that other people make and I am allowed to not have a relationship with them over their choices.

Don’t act like I am the bad guy here. Give me a god damn break. I’m not supposed to be allowed to break contact with my family after how badly I was abused? Oh go fuck yourself. With a chainsaw.

So far I have tried pretty hard to avoid using the full names of my family members. Occasionally a first name slips out. Very very rarely a last name (and we don’t all have the last name) so I feel like I’ve been polite and all that. I’ve been trying pretty hard to make my story about me and leave other people out of it. If I feel threatened the correct thing for me to do is to come out more, not less. I don’t think anyone in my family would like it if I used their legal name every time I talk about my family history of pedophilia and rape. That would make Google a very different entity in their lives.

Right now I believe I am one of the top ten hits for “my father raped me”. I have left my family out of that very consciously. I could change that. If I feel more threatened I absolutely will.

The main protection I have in this life is to not be silent. I can’t give it up.

I heard from my brother; Christmas loot; bdsm semi-graphic recollections; and asking for what I want.

7 Replies

Last night my brother sent me a text message. “Merry Christas. I heard you put out a book, can you send it to me.”

I haven’t spoken to him since right after Uncle Bob died. Not since he told me that telling my story was just melodrama.

I responded “Google: “No Secrets, No Shame, No Silence.”

Now I’m scared. I feel like I should have just ignored it. But I can’t. Fuck him. I don’t need to hide. I told the absolute truth to the best of my memories. I acknowledge in multiple places that I might be making mistakes in details because it was all so long ago–this is what I remember about my life.

I’m not making mistakes about being raped or molested. I’m just not. I’m forgetting the order of when I lived places. I moved more than fifty fucking times. I challenge anyone to keep that straight when they are talking about their lives between the ages of birth and eighteen. Impossible.

I’m shaking. I wonder if I will sleep again tonight. I feel like I am going to vomit. I have the bucket with me. Oh my trusty bucket.

I’m scared. But strangely I want to find the self-motivation to start editing again. I know I’m not done. I know I have more work to do to make it actually polished. It is still kind of hard to follow. I can do better. I know it. How in the heck will that fit into the schedule next year? Who knows. But I need to do it. Maybe that can be what I mentally put into my “break time” during the day. (The kids get two hours of iPad usage from 2-4 so I can have quiet in my brain and not kill anyone as I’m making dinner.)

I want the book in paper. People have suggested a Kickstarter campaign to me. I’m thinking about it. It honestly isn’t quite good enough yet. There are a lot of stupid mistakes I PAID AN EDITOR TO FIX AND YET HERE THEY FUCKING ARE. Sigh. Oh well. I’m reread sections on my phone when I’m feeling freaked out by other people getting to read it. “Oh shit, what did I say?!”

Now my brother knows. He isn’t talking to the rest of the family (last I heard) so who knows how this will go.

But now he knows. That can’t be undone. If you haven’t bought the book or left a review go do so. Please. Somewhere between one and three people buy the book every week. I’m up to almost 1700 downloads. That’s pretty cool. But mostly people won’t know about it unless you tell them. I’ve told the people I know. Now it’s about other people telling the people they know.

And don’t freakin tell me “I don’t have a kindle“.Whatever. They have an app for that.

I finally had that crying jag. The one I predicted a couple of days ago. Noah took the kids to the park for a few hours and I spent the time wandering around in chores. In the middle of trying to fold the clothing I noticed that I was crying so hard I could barely see. I set the clothes on the bed then I noticed that I was thinking to my knees. I could feel myself starting to crawl towards the side of the bed but there is always this other part of my brain off on the side that says hey Krissy maybe you should use the bathroom and get a few napkins for your nose. So I did that first with tears streaming down my eyes then I went straight back to the side of the bed. The side of the bed next to the window is barely big enough to walk through when I’m scared it seems like a good place to hide. It isn’t a lot bigger than my body when I was younger I would have been under the bed.

I cried and cried and cried. I thought a lot about my mom; I miss her so much. It’s worse at Christmas. Really I thought a lot about everyone in my family. I feel like all of their stories are so sad. I think I found the “can’t commit suicide point” though. if I ever commit suicide my family will rush to tell their side of the story and they will try very hard to make me look like a liar. I am not a fucking liar. I have to outlive them, all of them. If I don’t they will try very hard to make sure I don’t exist; they will erase me. No.

I haven’t been sleeping well. Not nearly enough sleep. I’m tired and sleepy all day long. Because Noah is here I’m taking more naps than usual.

I feel like a ghost. I feel like a strong wind could push me away. I don’t want to die. But I want to stop fighting. I want to stop defending my right to live. I want to stop having to earn the right to be not hurt. I am tired of trying to beg and beg and beg for people to love me and not hurt me. I’m so tired. So very tired.

It’s hard for me to read more than a couple of pages of my book at a time. I don’t want to identify with that story. Mostly I kind of put it out of my head. I am not that broken, destructive little girl anymore.

Yesterday my daughters broke the light fixture in their room. Glass showered a huge pile of stuffed animals, bedding, Lego’s, Barbie clothes, etc. Double Plus Not Good. Noah helped me. Cleaning it up wasn’t that big of a deal. Having help changed the scope of the problem significantly.

When I was a child I would have been beaten and screamed at for hours. We shook our heads and told Shanna that this was “not good” then we sighed and cleaned it up. We talked about why it wasn’t a good idea. We said we hope she doesn’t do something like this again.

That’s it. Moving on.

Every day that I am in this life feels like a fraud. I am not nice. I am violent. I am angry. I am mean and hateful. But I just can’t be with my kids. That’s wrong.

Noah gave me a parenting book for Christmas. Giving the Love That Heals so far it seems reasonable. But then I got to the part where they explicitly say this is not a book for people who have been severely wounded by their childhood–that is a different journey. Should I just quit reading? I feel so bad. I spend a lot of time feeling like the universe wants me to quit. I am broken beyond redeeming.

Fuck you all. as

I want my brother to know what I said about him. I don’t mean to hide anything. I have no secrets, right? I have a lot of stories I haven’t told yet but that is different.

Sometimes people ask me if I am afraid, what with being so out and all. They ask me if I am afraid of being stalked. Not really. If someone comes to my house intending to scare me I might walk outside with a baseball bat and say, “Unless you start running really fast you won’t be walking away from here.”

I’m not very scared of random people any more. Unless they want to shoot me there isn’t a lot they can do to scare me. And I’ve been very suicidal for a long time. I’m not going to run away from someone threatening me. That’s a way to die without having the whole guilt of suicide. It wasn’t my fault–it was some crazy gunman. That will be much easier for my kids to live with.

What, you don’t think about this shit?

I am afraid of being ostracized. I am afraid of being alone. I am afraid of being unloved. I’m not afraid of dying. I think I will welcome that.

It makes for a very different set of behaviors.

I’m afraid of ending up like Puppy’s mom. She has a job she is ok with but doesn’t love. She sits at home and reads books and chain smokes and drinks coffee and eats cookies. She doesn’t do a lot else. She is bitter and angry. She has been treated quite badly in life though I don’t know or care about the whole story. (Puppy was the serious boyfriend right before Noah asked me to marry him. He dumped me on Thanksgiving. Good riddance.)

Wow. Puppy dumped me more than seven years ago. Time sure flies when you are having fun. Tom and I broke up more than eight years ago. A different lifetime. Ten years ago for Christmas I was given a new ball gag, a portable tens unit, and the Uncle Kracker album with the song Follow Me. This year I was given bath scrubs and parenting books and an egg beater. I begged for the egg beater. That is the thing I have missed the most this year since Sarah moved out.

Once Shanna turned on her chair and sighed deeply and said, “Getting stiff peaks with a fork is sure a bitch.” She said it on the exhale of a sigh. It was hilarious. I almost fell down I was laughing so hard. Luckily she hasn’t said it again.

Oh! I got the dress I’ve been wanting for more than five years! I found it on etsy right around when we were starting to try and get pregnant. I decided I couldn’t have it till I had some idea what size I would be long term. I like it as much as I thought I would and it looks as good as I thought it would. Win. Noah did not nearly score so well.

The kids… well, they have generous grandparents. They made out like bandits and don’t appreciate it particularly though I have seen most of the new dress up clothes cycled through. Shanna is in love with the bead set–I thought she would be. She’s making jewelry constantly. It is great hand eye coordination practice so I’m trying to be permissive.

Really all of the new stuff is appreciated but they don’t react particularly in the ways I (apparently) “expect” children to act and that’s weird for me. I’m trying hard to just accept them and not try to direct this. That’s not useful. They are having the experience they are having. Go with it. I am making more comments than I should. It is hard to be as silent as I know I should be. Noah is continually pointing out my inherent hypocrisy; living with him is a mixed blessing sometimes.

He keeps me honest. I don’t want my kids to be particularly attached to things. And they aren’t. They don’t think that getting “more things” means someone loves them more. They just aren’t swayed by it. I should push them into that mindset. Not one little bit. LA LA LA. Move on Krissy.

My mom was very much of that mindset. I was pushed towards that mindset. I kind of have it but mostly don’t. Mostly I am quite low in my attachment to things. Except that egg beater. I really missed having an egg beater. But I don’t care much about which one I have. I’m not particular about “things”. If someone told me I had to walk out of this house with the clothes on my back I would probably clutch my laptop and go. I can deal with the loss of everything else. I would probably want to get dressed very carefully–I would wear several layers… I’m just sayin’.

I look forward to living out of a suitcase. When we went to Scotland for a month we had one large rolling suitcase and I think three small-ish backpacks. For a family of four. It would have been far less if I hadn’t needed all the baby shit. And we were going for a wedding so we needed fancy schtuff.

Someday Noah and I will go on long trips with a couple of backpacks. Well, they might be rolling bags because I am old and my back hurts. Maybe. We’ll see. Backpacks are better.

Notice how this digression happens? I start off with an SMS from my brother and I end up talking about how badly I want to run away. Predictable. I suppose that when it comes to my family I will always want to run away. That is predictable.

I did something brave. I invited someone not already in my completely comfortable zone to go on a trip with me. I get to do a lot more in-advance negotiation than usual this time. (*wave to person*) I feel like most of my problems while traveling happen because I don’t negotiate my boundaries well enough. I also don’t anticipate a problem because this person is not someone who walks into my life and drops work on me. I’m trying to be more paranoid about that kind of thing. (No leaving two bowls to wash after making banana bread doesn’t count as dropping more work on me. It’s about scale.)

I’ve been listening to Mean by Taylor Swift on repeat for a few days. (Tay–I think you will like this a lot more than you like Lady Gaga. Ha.) I don’t want to be mean. I know a lot of mean people. What does it really mean that I get to pick who I know? Don’t you have to take the bad with the good if you want community? It’s all or nothing–right?

That’s why I like having parties.

Sobonfu told me to make my own community. She told me I would never fit anywhere and that’s fine–make my own. Bruce told me to start a religion. Noah gave me a book for Christmas about how people should be starting their own Tribes. I don’t think I want to start a religion. Sorry, Bruce.

Several times I have had people tell me that I inspire them. That they think of me when they are scared or weak and that helps them find the strength to go on. It is a staggering thing to be told. I don’t feel worthy. Heh. That’s kind of part of the whole thing–right?

Being told that is intoxicating. It is far more potent than any drug and I’ve tried a lot. Having in the back of my mind if I keep going maybe I will hear that again is heady. That’s an addiction too.

Part of the reason that I’m weird to Noah is when guys want the way I want it comes out very differently–it’s a very different search for status for a guy. They have to have money or position or esteem or something before they can have pretty much anything so their want gets directed toward things. (Of course this isn’t universally true: missionaries!)

When I try to think about what I want it is generally in the vague sense of relationships. I have caused quite a few people to not be interested in relationships with me because I like labels that are denotative rather than connotative. If you know what I mean. If you don’t, what I mean is: they say, “We are friends” and what that means is they will think about you when you are right in front of their face and at no other time.

I wish people were honest about that up front. If people referred to me as an acquaintance then I would have such an expectation. They know nothing about me and do not think of me but they have seen me and been introduced. I wish that word was brought back into wider usage.

I like having a large and charming social of social acquaintances. I don’t like having many friends. I am too demanding. I have too many little ticks and irregularities. People have to be willing to take notes and modify their behavior in order to become people I feel comfortable around. Folks who think that isn’t worth their time or attention aren’t actually my friends. If you know what I mean.

But that’s ok! There is this large miasma of people in the acquaintance category. I don’t expect them to give a shit about me. I don’t expect them to modify themselves for me in any way. I just privately (or not so privately) think of them as assholes. I’m civil. Barely. I just try to avoid them.

I have those specific coping methods from the sex communities. It is weird coming into the home schooling community. I have to change how I talk to people. When I take something badly I have to say, “I’m sure that I am not understanding you correctly but I thought I heard you say ____ and to me that sounded like ____ but I’m sure I am misunderstanding. May I ask you to explain?”

It’s fucking hard and embarrassing. But I have to do it otherwise I will start avoiding gatherings because people are there. I can’t do that to the kids.

I want to feel safe from sexual assault. I am going to be avoiding the sex communities for a while and I’ll see if it helps. (Not that I actually feel afraid of anyone in particular at those parties. I haven’t run into anyone who has assaulted me at a party since it happened.) But I’m obviously having conflicted feelings. I don’t need to feel pressure to be there. It’s an opt-in space. I’m doing something else.

It is giving up another piece of my identity. Am I not kinky any more? Am I no longer a pervert? Can I ever undo the things I have done. THAT’S WHY I LET HIM TAKE PICTURES. None of it can ever be completely forgotten. I have pictures. Hundreds. I have a lot of pictures of me fucking girls too. I had a really fun early twenties.

I’m not worried about blackmail because if someone released some of them publicly and it caught wind I would say, “Ooooh! It’s part of a set! Would you like to see the rest?!” Then I would send a lot more.

I used to sleep in a steel cage. I hear he finally made a more comfortable bottom for it. I had my ex-fiancé Steve make it–he was a welder by trade. With one inch steel tubes. It was a grid. It was 2′ x 2′ x 3′. It was a birthday present for Tom the year he turned thirty-two.

I need to not hear these things any more. I don’t really want to hear that Tom had a floor made for it because the current girl wants it more comfy. I want to pat her on the shoulder and say he is in the honeymoon phase. Be careful.

Edge play is something that is talked about a lot in the bdsm world. It is usually treated as what people should be trying to graduate towards. It is often used to mean heavy play. I wish it weren’t. In my opinion edge play is doing something that has a measurable risk of ending your life.

In the past few years a couple of close friends sat me down to lecture me on the escalating risk of me continuing to do breath play–you know, being choked out. It can be done in a variety of ways. I had to, in turn, go to Noah and talk about it. I have had to remind him a few times. It is hard. It is hard to have tears running down my face and have to say, “If you don’t want me to die while we are having sex then you should probably stop doing that.”

Yes, it turns you on. Yes, you want to do it to me. You can’t. Not if you want me to live. I am an animal. I have limits. I am skating near the edges of the amount of trauma a body can absorb. I wish that wasn’t true. But it is.

I have a lot of pictures of my life being risked so that someone could look at me and masturbate.

I have some interesting feelings about that. Ok, most of our play was extreme but not life-risking. We saved that for special occasions.

And I’m not saying it is his fault or that I was abused. My ex emphatically did not abuse me. I scripted most of our intense play. I’m not blaming him. I’m really not. I helped him build a lot of the equipment we used. I gave it to him as presents. I was not abused. I went to fucking Great America and had the bemused air brushing artist paint slave on my back. I wasn’t being abused. I was very proud of what I was doing.

Why did I want that so much?

When I look at the pictures (err, not that I do this often) I’m usually struck by how sad I look. Resigned. As a result he mostly liked to cover my face. He was into hoods. Made of leather, plastic and duct tape, rubber, vet wrap… whatever. As long as he didn’t have to look at me.

I like living with someone who likes looking at me. I like living with someone who likes listening to the sound of my voice. I get three of them. It’s like a god damn miracle. But in order for it to work I have to be just as interested in them.

How do you live like a main character in an ensemble cast? How do you balance all of the needs?

But that’s kind of a lie. Our needs are food, shelter, and water (even though Yakutat freaking Alaska thinks you just need food, shelter and booze). Noah would be supplying those needs if he slacked at work; I promise. But he does a lot more than that. And he comes home and works hard on having relationships with the kids even though he’s an introvert who would really like to be in a quiet dark room.

Because we need love too. And the only way for us to have it is to give it. And give it. And give it long past when we feel like we want to. Because the kids need it right now. They won’t always–eventually it will be cloying and stifling and inappropriate.

It feels really good that we get to be spending so much of our life on a love-in. I know that not everyone gets that.

I had this horrifying childhood but I always felt like there was a way out. How would life work if I didn’t think that?

Privilege. I have so much of it that it is coming out my ears. With great privilege comes great responsibility.

One of the movies I watched recently, I think Winter’s Bone had a scene that is sticking in my head. I couldn’t easily find it on youtube. The kids haven’t seen their father in weeks. Their mother is mentally ill. She hasn’t responded or moved in months. The oldest daughter is trying to figure things out. The three kids are standing near their house watching a neighbor butcher a venison he hunted. The son suggested that they should ask for some meat. They were starving. But the oldest sister said:

“Never ask for what ought to be offered.”

That has been rolling around in my head like a marble. Never ask for what ought to be offered.

But that assumes that everyone around you has the same culture and knows which things ought to be offered.

Tricky.

My culture is white trash. What is yours? Tay–if you say you are white trash I will smile, exclaim “brother!” and hug you to me. It’s an opt-in label. No I don’t get to define it for anyone else.

I just have to figure out who and what I am and what I need. Then I need to figure out how to meet my needs on my own. I understand that this should be obvious and all but it isn’t. I didn’t grow up like that. Now I have a great series of child development books and I get to find out how to forgive myself for being a child.

It is hard being endlessly nice as my kids do frustrating things. But childhood is full of such errors. If you make your kids feel bad for making mistakes then they will be afraid to try things. I don’t want my kids to be afraid to try. I want them to get better at risk evaluation. Different.

I want them to know lots of different kinds of people. That means I have to be able to figure out how to meet my needs no matter who is around. I don’t. Right now I hide behind needing to model for the kids.

I’m bad. What kind of model could I be? As long as all they see is love am I really bad? Do the things I have done define my worthiness to love now?

I hope to fucking hell that I will be good enough. I know I don’t have forever just because I want it. When I’m really maudlin I worry about the kids reading this whining some day.

The uncontrollable crying is because I hurt my mommy. I rejected her. Partially because of things that were outside her control. It’s not just that though. I rejected her because I don’t like being blamed for everyone else’s problems. It is not my fucking fault that my father raped my sister for three extra years.

But having kids who are 2.5 and 4.5 and thinking about my life then and what happened when I was a child…

I don’t need to forgive them. I need to forgive me. It was an accident. It isn’t your fault that they are so mad. They just aren’t allowed to be mad at anyone else.

I’m not allowed to be mad at my kids. And I’m not allowed to be mad at my husband. And I’m not allowed to be mad at my friends. And a parade of therapists, my husband, my friends, and my kids if they ever find out will all join the shouting that I must stop being mad at myself and I must stop hurting myself.

But I’m so fucking mad. I’m not even supposed to be mad at the people who hurt me? No. Being mad is poison. It does nothing to them and it hurts you.

It’s ok to remember and forgive myself for being a child. I don’t need to waste time thinking about whether or not I forgive my family. I don’t. They won’t accept responsibility and they won’t change. I won’t be at the bottom of the shit hill any more.

Good grief. Two hankies of crying. That’s probably enough for one day. I woke up earlier than usual. Wow. More than 4500 words. Don’t you wish you had that time back? Today friends will come over. I will ignore the fact that I wish I was hiding under the desk in the garage sobbing and beating my head on concrete. It will be fine. It will be a lovely day.

It really doesn’t matter how I feel. I want community. This is how you act if you want community. If you deviate you don’t have community. How badly do I want it? Enough to function? Well. Put on your game face. It will be fine. Really. Go in, Krissy. Everyone is awake now. (4635. Ha.)

The loyalty trap

2 Replies

Recently a friend tactfully and gently pointed out that the way I write about family isn’t exactly standard. The kind of help I think I would get is fairly unusual. I couldn’t name a close friend who has the kind of relationship I write about wanting. No one has family who just shows up to take care of you–that isn’t how things work in America.

To this I reply: Ahh. You think that I have a mental model of a healthy family with boundaries. Hahahahaha. No. I come from a crazy enmeshed codependent family. What I talk about wanting is what I have seen. I get my longing for family from watching how people treated my sister having kids. Quite frankly folks worried about her being incompetent and immature. So they just showed up and helped. My mom did. My aunt did. My brother did. I did. Sometimes cousins helped too.

I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately trying to figure out what I mean when I say “white trash”. I’m trying to figure out how to explain it. Some day I want to have a concise definition that really explains what it means to me. I’m not there yet.

Movies I have streamed on Netflix recently: Winters Bone, The Poker House, The Burning Plain. All featuring the same actor (Jennifer Lawrence) and I feel kind of weird about her going on to be an action star. I probably won’t get around to watching the action movies any year soon. I care about the depictions of violence and family.

If you care about movie spoilers don’t read the rest of this post. That is your warning. That said, I think all three of those movies would be useful for people who want to understand me. Of course none of them is exactly right but there are interesting elements in each.

In Winters Bone she is trying to track down information about her father. She has to ask nosy questions. She lives in the Ozarks and she has to pester extended kin that don’t like to be pestered. She gets beaten by a group of women who do it so that her uncle can’t get mad at the men. There is this strong pressure through the whole movie that the police are the enemy. Drugs. Drugs. Drugs. My family used to do drugs like that. These days everyone has prescription meds.

In The Burning Plain you see seemingly disconnected stories that eventually make sense. It’s about mothers and daughters and feeling invisible and accidents and hating yourself and running away to deal with how much you hate yourself. Charlize Theron manages to look as empty as I feel. The way she self harms, the way she runs away because she is bad… yes. I understand that.

The Poker House is the most recent one. It is based on Lori Petty’s actual life. (The chick from Tank Girl.) Holy shit for shoe shine. My mother never prostituted herself and my mother never did drugs in front of me, so I had a very different set up than this movie. Nevertheless I had similar levels of neglect. Similar kinds of being abandoned in unsafe environments. I thought the rape was extremely well done and non-graphic but accurate. That is the truth. That is how fast and how easy it happens. I actively dislike the fact that Lori Petty’s take away message is “Don’t hold a grudge–forgive people for hurting you because they were hurt too”. To that I say: “Bullshit. I have children to protect.”

When I gave up on my family I gave up a lot. I gave up a support network that hasn’t worked in years and fucking loves hanging out with little kids. My family loves children under about eight. They are still cute and fun. Especially little girls. And my little girls are so angelic and wonderful that they would have done well.

But three people in my family have told me that my sister sexually abused them. I have fairly good reason to think that my kids would be good targets for her. The price of all the support is that you have to keep your mouth shut and understand that “people make mistakes” and ignore horrifying behavior year after year. If you need the support and you cannot survive without it this is the bargain that must be made.

I don’t fucking need the support that bad. I can sit home and cry from being overwhelmed instead. It’ll all work out. They are less overwhelming by the month. Shanna is much better at picking up after herself and my life is getting much easier on a day by day basis. Before too much longer they will actively make my life easier. They want to. They understand that doing so leaves me with more energy to do the things they want to do. Their mama didn’t raise no fools.

My sister hasn’t had a job since around when Shanna was born. She was laid off and lived off unemployment. I have the general impression that they are waiting for my mom’s social security to come in. She’s going to get my dad’s because they were married long enough. I think that is totally fair and it means that her retirement will be the most financial security she has had since divorcing him. I hope she finally settles down. I hope my sister isn’t molesting the kids she baby-sits. That’s what she does with her time. She stays home and takes care of little kids so their teen moms can go to school and/or work.

But I know she is a pedophile. I know how inappropriate she was with me. We didn’t have sex. But she did start telling me when I was four years old what I had to do to relax my anus so anal sex didn’t hurt so much. It was actually a thing for me for years. I didn’t manage to successfully have anal sex until Noah. (Violent sodomy as a small child doesn’t count. No, I didn’t relax enough to make it hurt less then either.) He was the first person who could work through that fear. A number of people tried before then. It always hurt too much and the hysterical crying freaked people out.

I felt specifically bad and like a failure because I was not able to have anal sex with the people who wanted to before Noah. I have had a lot of intense feelings of lack of worth because I was not able to do what people wanted. I was supposed to.

My sister is probably really who taught me this. I think she was the main consistent source of this. She talked about sex all the time and had sex in front of me and consciously and deliberately told me what I should go do.

I can’t play the game any more. She’s not ok. And my children do not deserve to be exposed to her.

But I’m losing out on cousins who fix my cars. And cousins who know how to help with plumbing. And all the free babysitting I want. And holidays full of people. And a niece and nephew who really need my help.

I can’t play the game any more. I’m not at the bottom of the shit hill any more and I won’t allow them to set the terms of reality. I just can’t. But it is hard.

You know how I moved around a lot as a kid? I was often staying with relatives. I didn’t know them well and I didn’t stay long so I never got to know them… but they took me in. Over and over. My family takes care of children. They would have been very happy to know my children.

But it’s a trap. It’s all or nothing. You have to play the game and keep the silence or you are out.

I’m out.

The social mask

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In the past three weeks I have had three people comment on the difference between what I write and what they see when we are together. That makes it something worth writing about.

Of course there is a difference in how I act in public and the crazy shit I write about. If I acted in public the way I write about on my journal I would be in a lot of danger. If I was unable to mask my craziness it would be extremely unsafe for me to go out in public. I would risk being 5150’ed again. I never want to go to a hospital again. I can’t lose it where anyone can see.

If you look at the whiteboard in my room there is a lot written down but if you notice very little of it is outside my house and even less than that is any kind of social activity. I generally keep my “socializing” to under twenty hours in a week and most weeks I’m under eight hours.

That is how much “playing the game” I can do right now.

On the occasional week when I try to push it and do more because that week just happens to be busy I am usually sorry. I will have to spend a lot of time in the bathroom crying for all the hours over my “maximum” I am actually out. It is embarrassing and humiliating and I feel ashamed of myself the whole time.

Being around people involves a lot of active and conscious thinking about “what I am allowed to say”. The consequences for getting it wrong include being asked to leave, being asked to never come back, or if I genuinely lose it and start freaking out I may lose my kids or get arrested.

I’m not exaggerating and I’m not wrong.

I’m aware of how “hysterical” women have been treated throughout history. I have done a lot of specific research. In olden times I may have had to walk around with my tongue in a heavy vice for days or had to wear a collar with spikes on the inside while tied to a post in public so other people could remind me how bad I was.

The consequences in the modern area are downright soft and fuzzy in comparison–I get that. Nevertheless I don’t want them.

I don’t want them. I don’t want them. I don’t want them.

I’m awake in the middle of the night because my stomach is hurting because I didn’t smoke before bed. By 2:30 my stomach hurts and I can’t sleep through it. Then I start having racing thoughts because that is just what I do when I am in pain. Then I risk being a mess tomorrow. Lots of breakthrough crying.

My kids know I cry. I can’t hide it from them. I try my best to present it as, “Everyone is different. I cry a lot–most people don’t. That’s ok. People vary.” They are still young enough that they don’t really ask questions about why.

Noah deals with/occasionally sees me crying as I’m going about my day. I wander around working and crying at the same time. That’s just life for me.

Yes, I believe this is something that I have to carefully keep people from seeing. This is probably, by hour, the biggest part of my life and I have to make sure no one else sees it happening. Or I will get in trouble for being bad again.

The fact that I wander through life feeling very sad and crying for many hours of most days is something I have to carefully hide and prevent people from seeing or I get in trouble. Over and over and over.

It’s not hyperbole. I can tell stories all day and all night long.

I’m at a very low ebb on my ability to “play the game” with other people because I require so much of myself for my interactions with my kids.

My kids know I cry. They know that I have wonky chemicals in my brain that make me prone to have my eyes just start watering and it’s not a big deal and they know that sometimes I think about things that happened long ago and it was bad and I’m really glad that my life is different now and I’m so glad that I know my kids. They know that they are nicer to me than anyone has ever been and that I am grateful.

Well, so far Shanna parrots these things back. I say “them” but I am still working on brainwashing Calli but Shanna is pretty ingrained at this point.

I feel really stupid sometimes but when I am saying in a calm and clear voice, “It’s ok to be mad at me. I do things you don’t like. You are totally allowed to have those feelings but it is not ok to call me names and it is not ok to scream at me. Try again.” I still have tears running down my face. I can keep control of my voice at this point–it is great effort but I can prevent myself from descending into the ragged sobbing sort of breathing that makes talking hard. I sound “like a teacher should” but my eyes are watering.

I feel weird knowing that my children are going to grow up thinking that your mom crying all the time is normal and something to ignore. I feel very ashamed of myself. I feel like I am proving those people right who told me that I should not be a mother because someone like me isn’t capable of being a good mother.

I’m not selfless enough? I don’t have enough self control? For the past couple of years of “bad cycle” which probably actually started as postpartum depression after Calli was born combined with Shanna hitting the age I was when my abuse started so I started having daily intrusive flashbacks.

That was not long after Traci–my therapist of seven years–OD’ed on heroin and I ended up finding Sharon who totally sucked and tried to talk me into believing that I had Disassociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personalities) because of how I segment my behavior when I am around people.

I don’t think I really took the placenta pills as long with Calli. I stopped taking fish oil. I haven’t started again even though I know it is a mood stabilizer. I have other supplements my therapist wants me to start and when I think of the act of swallowing pills I start to gag and my stomach aches just thinking about it.

By the end of the time I was taking all the god damn supplements my midwife wanted me on (15 fucking pills a day) I was frequently spontaneously vomiting them up.

My body knows that when I take a lot of pills it is because I want to die. That is what my body thinks is happening because I was dumb enough to treat my body disrespectfully enough that it doesn’t trust my intentions anymore. Smart body.

I really am not so good at taking pills. And the idea that I should take a handful or so every day for the rest of my life is something that I don’t think I can get my gag reflex to move past.

Even though everyone keeps telling me that if I only swallow this pill my life will be magically better. It hasn’t worked any other fucking time I’ve tried some fucking magic pill. I’m still me. I’m still completely broken. I still don’t have a family or very much consistent support–I am building it. I’m trying. But it is dependent on having people in my life who actually show up to do it. I don’t have many people volunteering for that role and of the people volunteering I have to evaluate for them if they really have enough spoons to be dependable *for me* because I am a god damn special snowflake with standards through the roof.

If I know I will have an out of proportion negative reaction to someone acting how they typically act I need to be very careful how much time I spend around them. It is not their fucking problem I’m crazy and that I have had “bad life experiences” that cause me to want to yell at them. If I can’t be tactful (otherwise known as keep my fucking mouth shut or on trivial topics) then I can’t be around people. I silently back away from most relationships because I don’t think I have the right to hurt people by being mad at them for being them.

I don’t know how to reconcile the fact that it isn’t that I actually think they are wrong it’s that it is very hard for me to keep straight in my head what kind of commentary is appropriate in which settings. I’ve been introduced to a much larger number of social situations than most people. I have moved somewhere between 60 and 70 times in my life. Each of those times involved meeting somewhere between five and hundreds of new people all in a big rush. I have lived at every socio-economic level from the projects to multi-million dollar homes and I went to school with Steve Wozniac’s kid. His son was best friends with the brother of the girl I was best friends with. Many of my friends had server space hosted by Woz because that’s just how things worked. That’s where I lived.

I could pull out my sock puppet prime minister (it’s a long story–maybe I will tell it some day) and name drop all the long list of two degrees of separation I have with “important” people.

So uhm yeah. I walk through life feeling like I am the lowest status person in every single room I walk into. I assume that if I say the wrong thing and offend the wrong person (and I have no god damn idea who the “important” people are–I constantly fuck that up) I will be told to leave and all of a sudden there will be a tidal wave of nasty gossip about me behind my back.

How many illustrative stories do I need to have? I could start with less than two years ago and move backwards over thirty years and have many dozens.

Being the scapegoat is hard. I have a lot of behavior patterns that get me into trouble. I don’t understand exactly how they work. I don’t understand why I am so god damn offensive to people but I am.

I tend to go through life believing that people who are still here are the ones around whom I have been most successful at wearing the right mask. I look for signs that I am breaking their social contract and I try very hard to apologize for fucking up before they have to call me on it because I don’t want to be rejected just because I said or did something that was inappropriate for someone in that kind of relationship.

I hyperventilate over this and hyper-analyze every thing I say or do after the fact and try to look for reasons I might have crossed a line and pro-actively send an apology. I really can’t handle losing many more friends. It devastates me so much.

Oh for the love of toast of course I hide “what I am really like”. I am unpleasant and needy. No one likes people like that. I really can’t handle having more people decide they don’t like me en masse. So I need to be god damn careful about everything I say and do.

After smoking for half an hour I think that the stomach pain has changed enough that I can try eating and see if that will help.

I have been trying to track my marijuana usage more. Why am I using it. When. What, specifically, is it doing for me that I need? Mostly it is the end of the year and I am freaking out about how much I spent (I used edibles basically exclusively for about two months while I was training for the marathon to clear some of the lung funk–yes smoking is disgusting and I would like to stop–and those two months cost as much as the whole rest of the year combined and gosh it sounds like way too much money for any medication and… accompanying shame cycle.) thus I am beating myself up about how much I need to stop using it.

If I’m going to damn myself it will at least be with accurate data.

I go through ~ 1/8 of pot/week. I wake up earlier than everyone in my family and I have some then. It calms my stomach pain enough for me to eat. On days when I don’t smoke before breakfast (often out of impulses of shame because I am a disgusting person for needing a “drug” I should just “willpower” my way through after all) I generally am unable to eat because the stomach pain is such that I have constant nausea and I have a ridiculously strong gag reflex. If I try to eat I have a lot of violent stomach pain because my stomach is not fucking interested in accepting food.

If I am in a restaurant this is when I have to get up and leave the table. I either go to the restroom or I go outside because I need to cry. I need to cry because it hurts and because I am ashamed of myself for crying in public just for something stupid that someone else would be able to hide. I know I am not exhibiting the proper social behavior and if I keep that shit up in public I will be fucking sorry.

At home that is when I say in a small voice, “Excuse me” and I go smoke enough to relax my nausea and deal with my gag reflex. I usually feel better after eating. But I am also still stoned after eating. So who the heck knows exactly where the better comes from. But on days when I don’t smoke I probably don’t consume a full meal worth of food in a day. I physically can’t. It hurts too much.

So a year ago when I went to the doctor I layed out all my issues and I was told she wouldn’t deal with my stomach until I dealt with psychiatry and psychiatry told me to take a pill I didn’t want to take, stop breastfeeding instantly (because this new magic pill is extremely toxic to me and the baby), and stop pot instantly or psychiatry would not work with me.

Uhm. No. Fuck you. I know what those side effects will do to my life. They will make it so I can no longer play the game when I have to because I will be debilitated by the side effects. I have watched this effect cascade with person after person in my life. No. No. No.

I will not work with a fucking doctor who spends five minutes talking to me and then wants to prescribe a medication that will destroy every coping method I have and tell me that I just have to “deal with it” while smirking at me. That is demeaning. You have studied what trauma does to the brain? Well so have I, motherfucker. You have not done a single fucking blood test. You have not done a brain scan. You have not taken a full medical history to find out how bad the side effects have been every time I have been forced onto a drug “for my own good” and how often that has lead to significant public blow ups and more trauma.

You don’t give a shit. It shows on the fucking smirk on your face. I don’t fit into your mold of a good person so you want to drug me into a stupor so that I stop doing what I am doing and blindly do what you say. No. You don’t know what I have to react to or why.

Fuck you. You want me dead. I can’t come to any other conclusion and continue to survive.

It took twenty-five minutes (I’m uhm babbling paragraphs in between random distractions else-net Oooh shiny! That’s a lot of why it sounds so incoherent and random-ha.) but I finished a piece of string cheese. Minimal gagging but I haven’t been able to eat any nuts yet. And my graham cracker is untouched.

We will have new insurance cards soon. I promise that as soon as I can log into the new insurance system I will make an appointment. I promise me.

An awful lot of why I am smoking the pot is to deal with my massive stomach pain. I feel very scared because if I reveal that there is an anxiety portion to the pain I risk not being treated again but if I don’t tell the doctor that I may not get appropriate treatment.

I feel like I am in a bind and there is no way for me to get out of it. I have to just throw a dart at a dart board and pray that I get a doctor who will want to help me without requiring that I instantly trust them enough to send my entire life headlong. No one deserves that kind of trust from me. Give me a fucking break.

I know that my intense fear of having to deal with a doctor for this is making the pain escalate unbearably. I understand that link. I understand that for most of the year the pain has stayed at a consistent 1-3 with spikes up to 5 or so when I try to eat without smoking but since I have been actively been thinking about the fact that I have to deal with this soon the pain has been spiking to 8 and 9 and causing me to nearly vomit spontaneously in public–which is kind of embarrassing. And shame producing. Knowing that my body may betray me at any moment and make me a public spectacle makes me feel constantly ashamed of existing. I should just fucking die so that I don’t have to go around inconveniencing people all the time.

When I vomited on the floor of the hospital when I was twelve, when I was waiting in the lobby to get a cast on my broken arm, my mom grabbed me, hit me and hissed: “You just did that to get attention.”

Over and over I sobbed “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.“

The nurse tried to tell me it would be ok but I couldn’t stop crying.

When I go out in public I generally did not smoke because I don’t do so before driving. Which means I have to get through breakfast without smoking if I want to go to the park. I generally don’t eat much or sleep properly the night before with anxiety about the spike in stomach pain and the increased difficulty in being patient with the kids.

That’s a lot of why I limit excursions out of the house. Those days are ridiculously hard on my body. When people come to me I evaluate how offended they will be if I am stoned and I try to uhm match expected tolerance because generally what I think other people will be ok with is lower than what I actually usually use.

This is the big problem with using any medication so sporadically. The effects are needed when dosage isn’t present. I have many days where I wake up and I let the negative thoughts get too entrenched before I start smoking (it is an unpleasant process and I don’t enjoy it and I don’t like being “the kind of person who smokes pot” and and and) so often I have to kind of psyche myself up first and bribe myself with the idea of being in a more pleasant mood.

The amount of conscious dealing with shame I do every day is really hard. I have to consciously deal with it or I will not eat and not sleep and get weak to the point where I am not physically able to complete my chores without slowly dragging chairs all over the house so that I can move from chair to chair to finish my cleaning.

Because I am that compulsive and crazy. I have to “appear” functional. I “have to” maintain certain appearances or I risk terrible consequences. I don’t know exactly what they will be or from whom. Sure as the sun will rise I will have someone else in my life whom I trust a great deal turn around and tell me that I am abusive and terrible and they are disgusted by me. It is going to happen again and again because that is something that people just feel free to say to me.

That is part of what I mean when I say that I am the lowest status person in every room I walk into. I am a white trash whore and I can never undo that. In any room I walk in to someone may decide to go off on me. It happens when I happen to say something I shouldn’t say.

Usually that means I answer a question honestly. People ask a wide variety of questions in the casual chit chat process that if I answer honestly the person will respond with horror and disgust and move away from me exhibiting great hostility. I have to guess which lies to tell and when.

When my mask is slipping, like it was this weekend, I went to a friends baby shower. Want to know my connection to the group? I knew the host from working together (where deliberately obscured) and the party was at the house of someone she has known since middle school–they were both around our mutual place of employment. I went out with both of them like twice. I uhh begged to eat out my friend’s friend. She let me. Then never talked to me again.

Till I walked into her house this weekend and she didn’t remember me even slightly (or at least gave no sign of remembering me–she certainly didn’t know my name).

This uhm, happens to me pretty regularly. I’m very careful what questions I answer when I talk to people in general. I uhm was kind of stupid.

So the father of the host (he has known the mom-to-be since she was a kid, remember) was chatting me up and he told me that his wife wrote a book but she is afraid to publish it. I uhm wasn’t thinking so I said, “I actually wrote a book and self published. If you look at places like Amazon publishing or there is a wide variety of competing models you can be e-published for practically nothing and you can get books in print and deal with hawking them at book stores yourself for fairly little money. That is how publishing often works, actually.”

So then he asked me about my book. He had to prod me more than once. “Oh you wrote a book? I bet it’s a lovey dovey romance isn’t it? I bet it’s all cutesy schmoopsy and adorable right?” heh heh.

Cue my not amused face.

“No, actually it’s a memoir about the first eighteen years of my life.”

*snicker* “No eighteen year old has done anything worth writing about.”

By that point in the conversation my heart was racing and I was breathing fast and I could feel the flush rising. I had been kind of avoiding eye contact. Then I looked straight at him and said, “Well I I was moved more than fifty times, I was homeless, I stole to eat, I went to twenty-five schools in diverse combinations of socio-economic levels and race: everything from the projects to graduating high school in Los Gatos after only going to that school for my sophomore year and only three semesters of high school total. (said to someone whose kid went to one of the worst schools in the east side of San Jose [these two places are right next to each other and Los Gatos is where all the rich people live]) I was raped or sexually assaulted dozens of times over more than twenty years, including my father and my brother extensively abusing me, along with a bunch of random neighbors. I self-mutilated for decades as part of how I dealt with what was going on with me and every mental health professional I have worked with has been freaked out by the variety and range of trauma I have been through.

I had enough happen to me to justify a book.”

At this point picture him kind of mouth agape blinking kind of fast. “Oh uhm. Wow. Yes. You would have enough to write about.”

We didn’t really talk after that.

I let my mask slip. I did not tightly contain my answer enough. I wasn’t appropriate enough. Mostly because I didn’t give a shit. I will probably never see this man again. My connection to him is tenuous enough that I just don’t have to fucking care if he thinks I am awful for unloading on him like that. (You wouldn’t fucking believe how often people screamed at me for uttering even four sentences of the above paragraph in a challenging voice. I should not be speaking. Shut up. I don’t have the right to make people think about unpleasant things.)

The conclusion I draw from this is I shouldn’t exist. Or I should simper and play stupid and lie and answer questions in evasive ways and for the love of crisco stop writing and talking about this shit.

So I do my very best to force my lips to be literally closed for as much of the time I am with other people as I can. I end every social interaction with sores on the inside of my mouth from chewing it so hard to keep from saying anything that might be inappropriate.

Yes. It is enormous physical strain.

I can’t tell how these descriptive/prescriptive things work about labels. People tell me that I should eschew thinking of myself as bad and stop thinking about my behavior as bad. But I regularly get into trouble I don’t want to be in because I don’t have appropriate filters. Bullshit I’m not bad. I’m punished for being bad often enough that it seems imprudent for me to stop trying to filter.

I want to be a nice person. I really fucking do. I am tired of being told I am not wanted and being abandoned. I am tired of people kicking me really hard and feeling free to tell me that I am a disgusting piece of shit but they still love me and if I start jumping through x, y, and z hoops then they might be able to have a relationship with me or help me. But not until I jump through all those hoops without support. If I don’t do that first I won’t be able to prove that I deserve them bothering to waste time and energy on me.

I uhm can’t bend to whims like that. I have to live in my body 24/7 and deal with the consequences. I have a very tightly controlled life that I can manage because I limit it so severely.

But when I say, “I stay home” I don’t mean that I hide in bed crying all day. I mean that my kids and I play in the yards and garden and walk for miles around our neighborhood when I stay regularly medicated thus I can sleep and eat in a way that allows me to be physically able to.

Since the marathon I have been fucking around with almost not using pot to see how this works for me. It’s going really badly. I need to see a doctor.

The reason I don’t just “get a vaporizer” to try it is because when I spend money on something believing that it is unlikely to solve my problem and it is money I don’t want to spend… it’s kind of doomed before I start. I can’t be on marijuana forever. I do have to figure out how to live life without it in order to do the things I want to do.

But what does that even mean? Part of it is that my stomach god damn hurts and I have to heavily medicate in order to deal with the pain and nausea in order to eat and sleep like a “normal” person and have any appearance of functionality.

Being in pain actively triggers my PTSD symptoms and causes flashbacks because I have such a long history of being in pain and that being something I am not allowed to talk about or deal with because “You aren’t really in pain–you are just a whiny hypochondriac.”

My mother screamed at me and threatened me that “my arm had better fucking be broken or she would break it herself” because I asked her to leave work early and come home (I was 12 and alone all day every day because I was on year round school and had no friends or family) to take me to the hospital. It was broken.

Something is wrong in my body. Something that I can’t fix. Something that I am self medicating (said with substantial scorn and derision) to deal with because doctors have actively told me they will not provide service until I jump through hoops I can’t jump through.

I can’t abruptly switch psych meds right now because I have no reliable help with my children. When I go through med rounds the side effects make me extremely unpredictable and historically very violent and my self-harming goes through the roof and my ability to function completely disintegrates and I spend hours every day literally hiding either in closets or under beds because I want to kill myself so much.

I literally cannot do that to my kids. There are reasons I’m not on psych meds. If someone bothered to ask me what those reasons were I would be happy to explain and I am willing to bet a compassionate doctor would hear my history and agree that it probably isn’t the best idea to try to force me to take a psych med as step one of any and all physical care.

That is not a way to establish trust because my behavior will abruptly be destroyed and out of control and erratic and I will completely associate it with my relationship with that doctor and have to stop association because I can’t continue to listen to the advice of someone who is going to force me to go through that given that I don’t have the fucking resources to deal with dropping the ball on the ways I am currently functional.

It feels humiliating. But that is the reality of my life right now. I stay home so that I can always handle talking to my kids in the tone of voice I want them to talk to me. I have to keep my physical stress levels down enough to not freak out when we are in an environment where I have less control.

Watch me at parties. If I stay seated the whole time I have a much better chance of being able to have conversations because being there makes me physically weak because of the strain on my body of having to be hyperaware to such a level. If it is a stand-and-mingle sort of party I am going to spend a lot of time walking in and out of the room because I have to go find somewhere to sit down and sob hysterically because standing in that room and trying to talk to people hurts my body so much.

No, this isn’t something that is obvious to people around me. If I was visibly contorting with pain people wouldn’t talk to me. If I said anything other than “Oh I’m fine” “Great!” when people ask me “How are you?” then they won’t ask me any more. And they won’t talk to me about anything else either. They try to keep a wide distance between them and me because I have revealed that I have needs and they are very fucking sure that isn’t their problem and they don’t want to get involved. That’s a direct quote. I get told that a lot. “I’m sorry. You have a lot of needs and I don’t want to get involved.”

Uhm, I didn’t ask you to do anything. I don’t fucking ask people to meet my needs. I can ask for help with wants–I have to be very ok with hearing “no” or with the fact that there is a better than 50/50 chance that I will be stood up because that is just my historical percentage. Because if I ask someone for help with a need all hell breaks loose when they let me down. My relationships don’t last through me asking things of people other than the pleasure of their company on sporadic occasions. I am doing my very best to ensure that I understand my place and stop fucking up this boundary.

Having this sort of level of need as a background thead in my life why won’t anyone help me means that I don’t understand how hard it is for people to meet my needs. I am not good at understanding the limits of how I should ask for things. When I ask for actual needs to be met I have to understand that the person may just not show up or may not feel like it any more once the time comes or have some emergency in their life that is more important than me so I have to suddenly scramble for how to figure things out at the last second without the normal planning time I give myself. It feels very unfair at the time I’ll tell you.

I go through life knowing that I am “not rational” and I am “over-sensitive” thus pretty much no one needs to give a shit what I think or feel because I’m a piece of shit.

No, I do not act in public like I have the thoughts I have. It would be incredibly dangerous. It’s not hyperbole; it is simply true.

Pity party, table of one

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Every life is a mixture of blessing and burden. Sometimes when I hear about the blessings that other people have I feel such envy. I dislike myself for feeling that envy. It is petty. I feel like I am going through life having one long series of pity parties for myself. My life is not like other peoples. When I found out I was pregnant with Shanna more than one person sat me down for a long earnest lecture about how someone like me (with mental health issues) has no business having children. I feel like I was essentially told to abort Shanna because I could not possibly be good enough to her.

That is not how other people experience the journey into motherhood. I am very glad that my friends have such different experiences. I feel very guilty that it is hard for me to listen to. I feel terrible about how much self pity I have. Get over it.

I feel kind of like a fraud. My family was fucking thrilled when I got pregnant. I paid for us to go to a conflict mediator. I tried to work things out. Then my sister loudly boasted about being able to kick my ass at my baby shower. Then my mother refused my request to come to Christmas because it “wasn’t worth it for her yet because the baby wasn’t interesting enough” because I am not interesting enough. Then it was “this is a loan not a gift. I will send you $20 every month until it is paid back.” She sent one nasty $100 after I told her not to buy any more cheap shit for my daughter until she pays me back. Then it was my sister telling me that the death of my father and brother were not allowed to count as significant to me.

If I want to know people I have to be very ok with the fact that nearly everyone I speak to is having a much more pleasant experience. I can’t be bitter. They are having troubles I am not having. I do not give proper weight to the difficulty of those struggles. I need to just love people if I am going to have relationships.

It’s ok if I cry about never really having a mother. That’s ok. I didn’t have a mother. I get to cry about that. No one ever really tried to meet my needs. No one volunteered or cared. I can cry about that. I can’t get mad because other people got more love than me. That’s not fair.

I don’t understand why everyone else deserves this love and I do not.

You know how I ate ramen for years? I started cooking it when I was three. All those years I was making the only food I really knew how to make. It felt comforting to have hot cooked food and we couldn’t afford frozen microwave food.

I have not been cared for in the ways that humans expect to be cared for by someone since I was an infant. When I was sick I was left alone to deal with it. I have dealt with post operation care alone. I was five. My mom didn’t want to look at my gross face after the dog attacked me. She told me that looking at that was my punishment for being stupid with the dog. She said I would learn not to stick my face in a dogs face. I had major reconstructive surgery with 117 stitches.

I am very glad that my daughters will have a different experience. And fuck you to the people who said I would be bad at this because it was inevitable.

I’m really glad that I am lucky enough to know people who have had completely different life experiences so they can tell me what it is liked to feel loved by a parent. I want to produce people who feel that way so I need to know what that kind of parenting was like. Thank you for sharing your lives with me.

(PS- I’m aware that I make a lot of weird typos and word substitutions. I don’t really have time to edit. I apologize.)

But then I came home and found out that my in-laws decided to send us a check for $15,000 out of the blue. Well, because a deer jumped on our car and because they still provide financial support to all three of his adult brothers. They feel bad for not helping Noah more. So they sent us money. Because they can.

I feel floored. That is seriously fucking with my world view. I am standing next to someone who benefits from enormous privilege. I get to borrow that privilege in substantial ways. It doesn’t come with a mother–I will never have any kind of relationship with my mother-in-law. We are non-compatibly crazy which is quite unfortunate. I don’t get to have a family but I get money.

I have a family. I have Noah and I have Shanna and I have Calli. Not everyone is so blessed.

Many years ago I had an intense fling with someone who was studying ayurvedic medicine. He did my natal chart. I had not told him much of anything about myself. He said I would always be lucky with money. Any time I needed it somehow it would arrive. I kind of startled. He laughed and said that anyone who challenged me in court would be sorry.

It’s not like I live my life trying to test that out but I have been really weirded out how much that has worked out. When I am not sitting at my pity party I am shocked by how much money just appears for me in a way that it doesn’t appear for other people.

The dog bite set me up for the first big chunk of my adulthood. Completely. I’m not sure it provided the lesson my mother intended. I run towards danger. The payoff is often well worth the damage I incur. I am ok with the results of karma in my favor. I had to deal with horrifying post-operative care when I was five years old and that was fairly traumatic. But it put me through college. And bought me three cars (they were all very good deals). And completely supported me for ten years. In a mercenary sense that was a good fucking deal.

Other people don’t have lives like mine. I don’t understand what it is like to be other people. But I’m very curious.

Please, stop telling me to relax.

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Every so often I will talk to someone New Agey and they ask me how they can be more sensitive of my “triggers”. I laugh and tell them not to worry about it. My triggers are mine. The world can’t be responsible for them.

I don’t know how to tell people that I don’t want them to tell me to relax. Don’t tell me to take a deep breathe. Don’t tell me to breathe into it. My earliest memories of my father involve him whispering into my ear, “Shhhhhhhh. Relax. Breathe into it. If you relax it won’t hurt. If you relax then your face won’t move. Relax. Let it happen. It’s going to happen. If you don’t relax it is going to be much worse for you.”

We we were in a group of people. The details are vague. People were moving nearby and I was practicing how to exhale slowly and carefully without flinching. I remember that I tried to smile at him. I said, “I lalu Daddy.”

“I lalu too, baby. Shhhhhh. Relax. You’re getting tense.”

Sometimes people ask me why I don’t “just forget” what happened. I don’t seem to be capable of denial as a defense mechanism. I feel haunted. I hate that I feel like a victim so much of the time even when nothing bad is happening. I’m just waiting for the next bad thing. It is inevitable. Who is going to hurt me next?

I’m working a lot harder at keeping people at a careful distance when I talk to them. I went to a party last weekend. I did the social chit chat thing without crying. That’s a big victory for this year. I feel pathetic. I feel a lot of other things but I’m not ready to write about any of them.

Sometimes it feels strange to me that I can talk explicitly about sexual abuse that happened when I was a toddler through child but I feel quite squeamish about getting specific about what I feel about anyone I am having ambiguous feelings about. Once I’m on a side of a fence then I spill the beans. I don’t want to dither about people more than I have to. It’s not nice.

I’m trying to figure out what and how that works for me. If I’m afraid of it then I will almost start doing it at some point. I have to wait till the kids move out. They didn’t sign on to that much asinine public shit.

I’m worrying about publicity and disclosure. Which is hilarious because Noah isn’t. Sometimes I think I keep him around because he reminds me a lot that I get to exist. I’m allowed to have opinions. I’m allowed to be an asshole in public. The world won’t end. Sometimes assholes say true things. Not very often. Even assholes can’t be worse than a broken clock.

I don’t actually think I’m much of an asshole online. Once in a while. Now I’m babbling. I don’t want today to start. I’m feeling very low on reserves. Luckily a Complication is coming for tea. I have therapy again tonight. I have a feeling that tonight is going to be the kind of night where I have a lot of trouble not beating my head on concrete.

It takes a lot of pain at this stage of my life to block out the experience of remembering things I don’t want to remember.

The worst part is that people always want to tell me to relax. Breathe into it. I want to fucking puke. I want to put my head through a window. Maybe the glass will be sharp enough to cut his voice out of my brain.

Shanna has been telling me to relax. I can’t explain to her why I sometimes have tears run down my face. I’m trying, Shanna. I’m trying. That is not something my body believes it is safe to do. I don’t say that. I say, “Because I’m so happy that I have someone like you in my life now.”

I think a lot about how the “parent by choice” sets a persons self-perceived value.

What are you afraid of?

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I am asked what I am afraid of. I went to a party last night. I have known those people a long time. Shunning. That’s what I’m afraid of. I sat at the party and I listened to people I didn’t know bicker. I listened to the relationship dynamics. The things they were saying and the frustrations they appeared to be expressing. I listened to the passive aggressive shit.

I didn’t stay in the group after Tom and I broke up because I didn’t want to watch what happened when he started hunting and I didn’t want to hunt in front of him. I know less than half of the people who are there now. Now I don’t have to worry about the crowd knowing my whole history. I didn’t want to parade men through the group. I would have been ashamed of myself. I am ok with people having a theoretical knowledge that I am a slut but I don’t parade my business.

I don’t want to be a parent in an open relationship because I don’t want to parade my business and I don’t want to keep dirty secrets. The only way I see to do that is to create an unchanging set of roles that they primarily interact with. It is a choice to be that kind of person for my kids. Not because I think all polyamorous people are bad–that truly isn’t it.

I’m not polyamorous. I’m a slut. I pick up random people on the internet for sex. I have done a lot of it. I have hit three digits of sex partners but I don’t know for sure. I lost my list in a hard drive crash. I used to keep an excel document with check marks for what sexual activities I did with whom. I did that in case I needed to look people up and say, “I tested positive.” I thought it was the ethical thing to do. I did actually go back and contact everyone when I tested positive for herpes. Even the one night stands I otherwise would never fucking have talked to again. It was hella awkward. I explained that I used to get cold sores as a kid, so I have probably had it all my life. I thought I was getting tested for it when I said, “Test me for everything” but actually they don’t do the herpes test as a standard thing. Whoops.

Sometimes people say that they won’t sleep with someone who has had more than x number of partners. I have had guys tell me that completely out of the blue so they can explain why they won’t fuck me even though I am hot. Cause obviously I was hot for them, right? The fact that I was not remotely sexually attractive to them was irrelevant.

I had a different point when I started writing. Shunning. Moving as often I did as a child is a constant slow motion enaction of shunning scenes. There were large scale specific instances that stick in my mind. When I was in eighth grade we lived with Seventh Day Adventists. Living with Uncle Bob sucked because he was a verbally abusive asshole. The only people who would take my mom and I in were the religious folk. They were kind as long as you did what they wanted.

I went to church with them. I went a lot. I got very involved. I started following Joey like a puppy and he was very involved in the church life. I went with him everywhere. I tagged along on trips up the the SDA college in Northern California, I found out about the boarding high school in Mountain View. I had fantasies of going before the church elders and telling them about my life and asking for scholarships. Please, please save me. Joey and I did a lot of door to door missionary work. I helped in the production of a series of classes on spiritual matters. I read my fucking Bible. I could quote it chapter and verse.

I had this friend at school, Yvette. She was involved in a different church. She invited me to come with her to a lock-in. That’s where they lock a bunch of kids in a gym all night long. It was a lot of fun. We played games and sang songs and told stories. It was one of the best nights of my childhood.

I came to one of the leaders of the youth group for the SDA church. I asked if we could look into doing something like this at our church. She recoiled from me in horror. She said that she did not condone filth. She told me that I would be better served somewhere else.

If I couldn’t go with Joey to the Seventh Day Adventist church then I didn’t have a way to get to a church at all. I couldn’t get off the mountain.

To punish myself for being unlovable by God I would enact the most horrible things I could think of. Mostly this entailed reenacting scenes from Bertrice Small books. I would dress up in the closest things I could find to corsets. I would wear really tight tights in layers until they caused me a lot of back pain. Then I would put on layers and layers and layers of gauzy skirts. I was very into the peasant skirt thing. I would put on many layers of shirts and dresses. When I was done I would put on a very tight belt. I walked around in the house. I would pretend to encounter strange men.

I would then pretend to be raped over and over. I used a wide variety of different items to penetrate my vagina starting with pencils. Sometimes I would experiment and see how many pencils would fit. I fucked myself with the legs of a Barbie. It kind of skeeves me out to see my kids play with Barbies. (Obviously not the same dolls.)

I would call myself names for hours. I would chant that I was a worthless whore and no one would ever love me. Even God didn’t want me. I was dirty and bad and I wanted bad things to happen to me. I deserved to be hurt. I was disgusting.

Then I started calling the radio dj. He was twenty-five. We went out on several dates. I was twelve. We didn’t have sex but he did ask me for a blow job. I gave it to him. I knew I was supposed to. I tried to be enthusiastic but it was really unpleasant. I tried to smile. I tried to not vomit in his car.

Not long after that my mother and I no longer were as friendly when the neighbors tried to tell us what to do and how to do it. We moved to the old house in the canyon for a while. I couldn’t stand living with my cousin’s girlfriend and her kids. I wasn’t nice to them and they weren’t nice to me. I think there is plenty of blame to go around for that situation sucking. Then Auntie and Uncle Bob bought the new house up in Redwood Estates and my mom and I joined them. It was like a palace. It was huge compared to the old house.

I spent a lot of time angry at God. I felt very directly shunned by God. I wasn’t. I was shunned by a tight-ass ignorant woman. A mean spirited harpy. Unfortunately God wears many faces. It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t speak for God. No one wanted to help me. Police officers told me not to talk about what happened to me after being sexually assaulted. I was isolated and hunted.

I don’t think the dj sexually assaulted me. I think he exploited my low self esteem, but that’s not the same thing. He didn’t force or cajole. He didn’t pressure me. I wanted to. I was enthusiastic. I asked him out on a date. I think he should have been a good enough person to understand that it was pretty bad for me to be doing what I was doing.

My mom didn’t mind me dating the dj. I broke it off. I felt disgusting and dirty when he gave me an opal necklace for Christmas. I knew it was a cheap shitty necklace. It was a gift worthy of my status. I was that bad of a whore.

Which isn’t fair. It was probably what he could afford. He didn’t know me. We didn’t have a real relationship.

But … yeah.

I don’t want to teach my kids to be the kind of promiscuous I am. It hurts me. I am to a point where I am capable of doing nonmonogamy in an ethical and reasonably safe way because I have made a lot of mistakes and I have been hurt in a wide variety of ways.

I have learned lessons that not everyone needs to learn. My kids don’t need to grow up and be like me. It is not important that my legacy be carried on in such a way. But maybe it is still important for my experiences to be talked about. That isn’t the same thing.

My kids aren’t having a life like I had but other kids are.

I really should try to sleep. I was going to try to go to the Renaissance Faire with the kids. Hahahahaha. We’ll see.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: telling the story

fake it.

more thinking. less err, tmi

And the storm passes.

There’s a first time for everything.

I asked my ex if he still had our slave contract.

Homeschooling and hubris and motherhood is not a career

book review as timeline

Storytelling and defensive rambling

Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.

I guess that means my family found my blog.

The loyalty trap

The social mask

Pity party, table of one

Please, stop telling me to relax.

What are you afraid of?