Category Archives: telling the story

Haunted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was Tuesday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On guns

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I can’t remember the first time I saw a gun. I am pretty sure I can remember my first time shooting. My father took me out to the desert with my brothers. I was four or five. My brothers were five and eight years older than me. Old enough that I thought my brothers were basically already grown ups. I didn’t think of the as kids like me. When they told me to do stuff I had to jump or get hit–same as the grown ups.

I remember my father taking great care as he showed me how to line up the sight on the rifle. I remember the thrill of knocking cans over. I knocked the can off a rock from twenty feet away. It was like magic.

I don’t remember seeing a gun again until I was nine or ten. I can’t remember which. Even when I try to write my whole life out I don’t remember for sure when this happened. The next time I remember seeing a gun was when my father set a hand gun on the couch next to him before he made me suck his cock. When he was done he picked up the large, shiny revolver and he held it to my head. He asked me if I deserved to live. I shook and cried.

When I was sixteen the middle college program I was in made everyone do aptitude tests. Over and over I was told I should go into the military. I am well suited. I would always turn to the teacher and say, “I’d have to touch guns, right? Then–no.”

All of the gun sightings in the rest of my childhood were benign: through shop windows and the like. When I started dating Tom at eighteen there was a sticky issue. He sleeps with a loaded gun right next to his head. If I was going to be sleeping with a loaded gun less than three feet from my head I should probably know how to handle it safely.

When I think of Tom as my Daddy this is the kind of thing I remember. This is part of why I loved him so much. Tom didn’t entirely understand my gun issues. He knew “something bad happened”. Tom didn’t want to know my story. He actively discouraged me spilling all the details. But he took me to the shooting range. He helped me learn safe gun handling and firing. He taught me how to check to see if a gun is loaded. You never touch a gun unless you know for sure if it is loaded or not. My Daddy would make me practice safe handling methods until I was shaking with fear so hard I could no longer physically grasp anything. Then he would take me outside and hold me while I calmed down. Then he would bring me back inside and switch to rifles.

I do fine with rifles. I’m a good shot with a .22 rifle. Quite accurate. It’s the hand guns I can’t handle. It’s the hand guns that make me quake with fear and unable to think coherently or rationally. I believe that human beings have the right to live even if that means we must kill other animals and eat them. I’m ok with being up the food chain. Hunting makes sense to me. Rifles make sense to me.

Hand guns scare the ever-loving-shit out of me. In another year or so I am going to find a gun safety course for Shanna. Calli will have to wait a few years then she will do the same process. My kids will re-up every few years. Guns are tools. I want my children to understand and respect them. They don’t have a Daddy who will teach them. I will have to find a way. I thought Uncle A would do it. But he’s gone now. That happens.

Sometimes I feel daunted by the things I don’t know that I want my children to know. How can I teach them to move through the world without being paralyzed by fear? How can I teach them to be safe without also triggering them learning my ridiculous panic? I don’t know. So far the explanation is, “I know I’m over reacting to this but it’s not necessary. This is one of those places where my brain is being broken. Crying is not mandatory at this stage.”

I’m trying to get to the point where I believe in my gut that the point isn’t about whether you cry or not while you do things–the point is that you do them. I do. I do things over and over. I do things that are very hard for me. I don’t deserve a medal. I do deserve to keep living.

If I ever own a gun it is likely to be a big shot gun. I won’t buy ammunition. I’ll just buy it to practice cleaning about three months before my daughters start dating. I think it is really weird that I have any impulse to laugh and agree with this sort of behavior. Why do I think it is good to threaten teenage boys? Because in general my life experience tells me that boys will be nice and respectful towards a girl if they believe there will be extreme negative consequences for ill behavior. Otherwise they are abusive and terrible.

One of these days I’m going to have to have different life experiences so I can stop hating everyone in the whole world. I hear there are nice people out there. Somewhere.

Chemical states and relationship transitions

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Something that probably isn’t obvious is: the frequency I write is largely dictated by how much shame I feel about what is swirling around in my head. I haven’t been writing as much. I feel too much shame. I feel ashamed of who I am and how I experience the world. I shouldn’t talk about how I am experiencing things because that is drama. Which means I am running in little hamster circles in my head. It’s almost fun only it isn’t.

I think I am depressed. If I look at my physical activity lately and my attitude I have (for me) almost stopped moving. For normal people this means I am still fairly productive. I do this by sitting down in the morning and drawing up a schedule for the whole day and marking by the half hour what I should be doing. I put in a lot of reading on days when I have to do this. I can follow a schedule and “do what I am supposed to do” if I am just following a set of instructions. I no longer have to think during the day. I check the posted schedule at least five times an hour because I can’t remember what I should be doing.
I feel very sad and disconnected. On one hand I am seeing friends and trying to deepen relationships. On the other hand I spend all of my time with people experiencing a lot of physical distress because I believe in the core of my being that people actually think I am a piece of shit and they are just tolerating me because that is what you do in life. It’s what I do with the pieces of shit in my life. I don’t tell them I think that about them. But I think it. So I firmly believe I am not the only one in the world.
I’m trying. I’m trying to ignore the irrationality in my head but it comes at a fairly high cost. My stomach hurts right now. It has been hurting for quite a while. My throat hurts. My arms even hurt from clenching. My jaw hurts. I can taste the bitter metal of fear and adrenaline a lot of the time. I can’t help but feel like living with this much stress will kill me whether I commit suicide or not. My body is simply working too hard. And I won’t give myself much of a break on the other activities in my life.
It is my job to show my kids how to be productive, sensible, functional adults. That means I can’t really model getting depressed and sitting around with my books and movies for months. Even though I know I used to do exactly that for long stretches. I’d go to roost and avoid people. I can’t any more. My kids can’t deal with that kind of isolation. They actually need people. 
I suspect that part of my issue is around money. I use money to fill in the cracks on what I have to do versus what I want to do–I expect that is standard. Right now and for a while I can’t do that. I have to stay home and not spend money. That’s hard because it means I am making today and yesterday and tomorrow a lot harder than they “have” to be so that some day off in the distant future we can do as ok as we are right now while we have a dip in income. Self discipline is hard. It wears through my willpower. I get physically tired. And knowing that I can’t do much of anything with money to make my life better triggers a lot of feeling hopeless about situations in my life. Either I can figure out how to do everything by magic with no money or I can deal with them just not happening. Things won’t get fixed. It makes me feel bad.
I don’t like feeling thwarted. It makes me want to stop trying. But I can’t. It’s not fair for me to stop trying. It’s not fair for me to stop hoping. I provide the structure of everything for my kids. They need to understand that frugality is not a death sentence. They shouldn’t view it with abject horror as making their lives terrible. You need to live within your means. It’s not a harsh sentence. It’s life.
My tomato harvest will once again be epic. I anticipate begging access to a pressure canner this year. I have frozen enough fruit to get us through the winter. I feel good about that. We will need more meat before the end of the year. Ok, I just set up a beef pickup in September. I believe the internet is Magic. This means I can save up the $600 for the meat over more than one month. Woo. I am starting to build my stockpile again. I cleaned out all the food in the house for Sarah so we could build a stockpile of foods we both like to cook with together. That didn’t really happen and I haven’t had a full larder in a year. I have a fair bit of stuff in the freezer I will probably never use because it’s not stuff I like and I have otherwise been just trying to make up the deficit in the food budget for a long time. We’ve been buying week to week until last month. I would like to spend the summer/fall stocking up so that over the winter I can lower the food budget and eat out of stores. We’ll see. Temporarily I raised the food budget by taking it out of other places. Money is not infinite.
I think it is kind of weird that I feel bad for feeling frustrated about money. I have access to far more money than anyone in my family. By far. My mother broke $30k/year for the first time the year she turned fifty. My sister I think got up above $60k/year. Noah makes more than twice that by himself. 
When people tell me that they don’t see any relevance for feminism in the current era I think: “Why is everything that women do esteemed so little and why is the stuff men do esteemed so highly?” If you think it is because the men stuff is more important I might kick you in the shins. If the poorly-esteemed work that women do stopped happening then all of a sudden you would have MUCH BIGGER PROBLEMS than if your god damn magical phone stopped working. Or if you didn’t have a computer oh no what would you do?! What your fucking ancestors did for millenium. Stop whining. 
We have an interesting way of deciding what is important and what is worth money here. I’m grateful that I get to be on the receiving end of that money but I feel pretty ashamed of the fact that I would never have had a life this comfortable without Noah. No chance. Comparatively I am worthless. That feels bad to me. If I didn’t have Noah I would probably have to go on welfare for a while. I can’t just go get a teaching job. I would have to go back to school because my credential lapsed. 
I know that all of my status is worthless if I stop having this man stand next to me. I feel thin. I feel unimportant. I feel permeable and insignificant. So of course I’m binge eating and I’ve gained weight.
I am only worthy of low status occupations and activities. It’s certainly all I do with my time. I garden and clean. I play with my kids. Shouldn’t I pay a gardner and a housekeeper and a nanny so I don’t have to sully my hands with those activities? Ugh. Yet more evidence of my class issues; I suppose. I feel strongly pressured to be idle. That should be the point of all this status I inherited from Noah. Only I physically cannot handle idleness. It makes me feel terrible emotionally and physically.
If I am not working to make my home nicer then I sit here and stare dejectedly at all the things I can’t fix right now and I cry. It’s not better.
I feel really bad because I can’t handle dealing with new people right now. I am slowly moving around the people I’ve known for many many years deepening relationships but I’m terrified of new people. I don’t know how to act around them. I feel so physically bad that the experience is really unpleasant. I feel guilty about this. I don’t believe I am done finding the people I will be close to this lifetime. I’m just really scared right now and I can’t do it.
Well I know one thing I’m doing today. I’m getting rid of the spider web right above where I write that is currently home to a spider the size of the tip of my pinky finger up to the joint. That’s rather disturbing. Awesome.

I feel bad because Noah takes my fussing over money as sign that he is not providing well enough. I’m having trouble convincing him that I believe he is a good provider. I think that is kind of funny. He is supporting me with a degree of luxury I have never consistently experienced in my entire life. Yes, it’s adequate. Really. When my petty cash runs in the tens of thousands no one should feel guilty. Holy fucking shit. We have a high burn rate. In order to ensure that we will actually be ok in case of a temporary set-back we need a very large cushion. It’s simple mathematics. Why does it feel so emotionally complicated?
But he grew up with parents who didn’t work at all and dealt with family investments. It’s a whole different world. He grew up with parents who didn’t have jobs and still paid people to clean their house and work on their property. It’s a whole different world.
I think I don’t want to have an outside job partially because I don’t want my kids to believe that cleaning up after themselves is beneath them and should be done by a menial laborer who cannot aspire to better for complex reasons of race, class, shame, and bigotry. I don’t want to get a job so I can have enough money to pay someone to be beneath me. I never get what I want from those relationships and then I hate people. It’s not a good system. You can’t pay someone enough to care about doing their job. People are either interested in their work or they aren’t. I’m interested in the work of maintaining my house. No one else is. I have to live here. I don’t want to live in a piece of shit house that is falling down around my ears. Maintenance is god damn mandatory.
Part of what I am struggling with right now is the fact that I want my kids to have relationships with people. That means they are going to have to deal with the fact that people are not reliable. They can’t be trusted to tell the truth. You have to be very careful how you partition out trust. Look at what people do and not what they say if you want to know the truth of a person.
This is what I tell myself because I try so hard to do the right thing even though I feel my speech is often offensive and wrong. I say inappropriate things. But at least I am physically doing all the right things at the right times of the day. Sometimes it feels like all that I have to prop up my self worth. Of course I value it highly. 
I have been thinking about storyboarding for the book but I haven’t picked up a pen. I’m afraid. I have ideas and I’m afraid I’m not good enough to complete them. I think the best thing about NaNoWriMo is the structured pressure of it. Produce, motherfucker. I am really looking forward to being post-marathon and in a writing phase again. I need a better ergonomic system before November or I am going to damage myself. My arms are tingling as I type. Shit.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the structure and nature of my compulsive sexuality. When do I do it? Why do I do it? What are the lead-up events? It’s a group coping activity. I don’t do it one on one in the same way–even with prey. I do it as a way of finding a position in a group of people. I know how to be the slut. It’s pretty much the only group role I feel comfortable in. As an aging woman it is one I need to get out of before I look more desperate and pathetic than I already do. 
I slept. I swear I did. I still feel tired. I feel exhausted in the marrow of my bones. I’m going out tonight. Sigh. Like, after bed time tonight. I leave at dinner time. Lately I have been finding it very important to financially prioritize supporting the endeavors of long time friends. I’ve paid to attend several shows/events recently just because I wanted to be in the same physical space as specific people. I don’t care much about the activity. I never really have. I want the people. I want to stand in close physical proximity to people who know a lot about me and like me. I ache for it. Being an audience is a fairly comfortable role right now. Little is expected of me but I get to make someone else feel good by being present. Nearly half of the fun money I have had for the whole year has been spent on going out to see two people in particular. I like them. I need them. If you add in this one other friend you get to more than half of the money I have spent other than the book. That’s been my money for the year. I don’t go to Starbuck’s. I don’t treat myself to books or music. I did take Shanna to see Brave. That is our movie for the year. We go to the park and to the kid places we have memberships to. We pack lunch. I severely limit my driving. Yesterday we drove to Oakland then Oakley then Vacaville to see people and I don’t think I can drive much the rest of the month. I’ve used more than half of my monthly gas allotment on one day. Well, ok. It was worth it. I only see them two or three times a year. I only drive up once. It’s worth it. That is how I am setting my priorities.
I like relationships that have a lot of hurdles to existence. If they continue then I feel like someone truly loves me. It is hard for someone to prove they love me. I get into trouble with expectations. I try to keep them low but once in a while I am foolish and I expect more from people than they are going to do. I recover from that with ill grace. I’m never thrilled when someone shows themselves to be not worthy of trust I have given them. It causes me to feel a lot of self-doubt about my general worth. I thought I could trust this person to do what they say and I can’t. It must be because I am not worth telling the truth to. It must be because I am not worthy of even thinking about long enough to follow through on commitments. That must be it. I am so fucking pathetic.
At this point I can’t talk about my anger and frustrations about these situations because I can’t express it in front of my kids. My kids get to have their own reactions. They don’t need to learn my anger. So I am doing a lot of stuffing. That means it creeps out in little insidious ways. I’m snippier and shorter of temper. It feels so unfair to my kids. I’m not mad at them. I’m just out of patience because I wasted it on adults.
I feel like I should hide in my house with my kids and not deal with people because that is the only way I can ensure I am just reacting to my kids and not the other people in the world. Only it only kind of works. Because then I bring the trouble home. The kids need relationships too.
This too shall pass. One of the greatest gifts of getting older is I trust that this phase will end. I won’t always feel this way. It’s a cycle.  I still don’t think I have bipolar disorder. This is why I put myself on a schedule when I feel like this. If I haven’t gotten anything done by nine in the morning I have to write up a schedule or it will be a couch day. I know it. I have occasional couch days when I believe that physically the rest is probably a good idea. I try to keep those to once or twice a month. I don’t want to teach my kids that a great big part of life is just sitting around not being productive in any way. You need rest, sure. But find a way to get your rest in while still doing something. Reading does count as an activity. It’s a great excuse to rest. Watching movies… well, sometimes. When you are sick, sure why not. Otherwise you need to move your body more than that. We don’t stay in one position while we read. 
I love seeing my kids develop my physical mannerisms. I feel affirmed and loved and seen. They read like me. We like to change positions a lot. Sitting still is quite hard. We squirm and wiggle and roll over and over. We stretch at the same time. They get books and do yoga with me. I get to set normal for them. They will grow up believing that what I do is right and good. It makes me cry. I have always been different from everyone around me and I was viewed as bad and a threat to be stomped down. I was supposed to be more like them. My kids think I am great. They don’t know that I have never fit in any of the molds I have been shoved towards. They don’t care. We fit.
I strongly encourage my kids to be different from me. I support them having different opinions. I talk to them (mostly Shanna still) about how I have control over them for a very short period and then they get to make all of their own decisions. I talk about how I don’t want to have control over them because they will have different ideas and opinions than me and they should do what will make them happy. I also talk about how to coexist peacefully. I talk about having respect for people around you. I model what that means. I really love my kids. I get to be good and kind and respectful towards people who absolutely deserve it and have no ability to let me down. My expectations of them are that they are helpless little amoebas at this point who will flail and be random. I’m pretty much right. But they will become adults who understand in the marrow of their bones what it means that Mom does what she says. 
That freaks me the fuck out. That pressure. That is what gets me out of bed every morning. That is why I make schedules and get shit done no matter how I feel physically. I god damn need to have more people in the world who believe that I am trustworthy and good and kind. I say some very harsh things and as a result a fair number of people think I am an asshole. I can’t really say they are wrong. But that is such a small part of me. I feel defined by the negativity in me. With my kids I have a perfect chance to have a different experience. 
I must say it is going well. This is one of the hard phases. I can objectively understand that my emotional cycles and their behavior cycles are being wonky and I’m being patient with all of us. That is what a good mother does. Well, I’m not patient with the screaming. I will put my hand over a screaming mouth because otherwise I get horrible headaches to the point where I can’t really see straight. If I have to drive I cannot allow them to hurt me in that way. I just can’t. Why do I feel so guilty about covering their mouths? I don’t make it hard to breathe. I am not cruel. I don’t do it for an extended period of time. I don’t shake them. I don’t hurt them. I don’t yell at them. I try to calmly say, “That’s an outside voice. Inside you have to be more quiet.” “No really, that hurts me so you cannot scream in my ear.” I have to teach them boundaries, right?
I don’t feel worthy of defending and my kids are pushing boundaries all over the place. It’s a hard combination. I’m trying to live up to my end of the bargain. I have to teach them how to be respectful of other people. It’s my fucking job. One for which I have managed to trade having a very cushy life. I have an easy job. I shouldn’t bitch about it. 
It’s weird to think about how I would handle these emotional cycles if I had a job. I think I never would have found time and space to really write. I think that would be one of the things I had to drop. I would be more volatile. When Noah showed up and asked me to marry him I was trying to work up the courage to ask him to raise a child with me but I thought I had no right to ask him for what I have now. I planned to work and raise one kid by myself. That would have been a very different life. I’m really glad Noah actually wanted me.
It’s really odd to me when I think about how to write about the journey from eighteen to now. My different phases seem extreme. When I was eighteen I was engaged to Stephen and supporting myself by working in the library and the theatre. I planned to make theatre my life. I really wanted to run a spotlight for Cirque du Soleil someday. I knew I wanted kids but I had things to do first. I thought college was a good idea but I was nervous. I really wanted to go to CMU for technical theatre.
Then I left Stephen and found Tom and the bdsm community. I transferred to the English department. I went to college but I did not have the immersive college experience; I was a commuter student on campus two days a week and I took classes straight through from ten in the morning till ten at night. When I finished my BA I had a choice to make. If I wanted to be active in the bdsm community and be an Adult all the time then I should probably go through graduate school and try to work at the college level. Then I don’t have to be as paranoid about being outed. Or I could decide that I wanted children and go for a degree that will give me a schedule more potentially compatible with theirs. Tom was not open to me being a stay at home mom. I went through some graduate school. I decided that kids were more important than Tom. I broke up with him and started the credential program. In order to transition out of that relationship and emotionally distance myself from him I started having sex with a lot of people. It worked.


I dated Noah for the last six months of my relationship with Tom. I think that Noah was probably a lot of the reason I finally had the nerve to end things with Tom. Noah doesn’t permit me to be unaware of why I am doing what I am doing. He’s kind of annoying. I broke up with him for a lot of reasons. I can’t sum that up.
I went through the credential hunting hard for someone to have kids with. I wanted to start soon and I knew it. I was very frank about it when I talked to people I was having sex with. There are some men who ping hard for the idea of having kids and there are some who are repulsed. I needed to know who was potential prey. I was hunting.

Puppy was a mistake. I thought he was like Tom only younger and wanted kids. I was quite wrong. I should have never tried to date someone who thought it was funny that I was an actual Californian and would mock me and my vapidness for living here. And he thought I was fat even though I was at my lowest adult weight. He was very harsh about my body. He was very bitter because of his ex-wife and has a lot of mommy-issues. That relationship didn’t stand a chance.

After that I had a few months where I stopped hunting. Then I met Spot. I knew he wasn’t The One to have kids with. I made up my mind to ask Noah about having kids with me even though I didn’t think he was interested in the kind of relationship I wanted. He wanted the kind of relationship he wanted and I was not going to fucking be the Other Significant Other. Hell Fucking No. I’m not going to make someone my priority as long as I am their option. 
But out of the blue he asked me to marry him. Just like that. Five months later we eloped. I moved into this house more than six years ago. Our sixth wedding anniversary is in September. I have to say that it is going well. I have the wonderful four year old and two year old of my dreams. My two year old is currently yelling “baby! high!” because she wants to be pushed on the swing. I should go before she slams the laptop screen on my fingers.

But I’ll come back to edit and tag and add that it is because my life is so good that I feel so bad about feeling bad. I need to stop feeling like someone who has had my life. It’s really hard.

Working is fun.

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I don’t know what I was thinking. How did I think I would get through over-night without Noah and the kids yesterday? Ha. I came home for bed-time. I called and told Noah to let the kids stay up a bit late and wait for me. When I got home I felt better.

I crawled into the lower bunk between Shanna and Calli. I cuddled both of them. Shanna rapid-fire told me all about her day. I wanted to know. I wanted to know about every second I missed. I was sorry that I missed them. I was sorry she got hurt yesterday and I wasn’t there to kiss it. She survived, of course. Kids get hurt. It’s ok. It sounds like she figured out most of the “class” parts of ballet. No more telling the teacher no one else was present. Ha.

I spent the day working in a coffee shop. That’s tiring work. I worked from the minute I arrived until I left. I took one ten minute break. I was in the shop for seven hours. Then I left to find food because I was starting to feel mean. I can understand why people in the community tell me that they don’t come in because they don’t like the food selection. We don’t have filling food. We have snack food. Hm. And I don’t want to take food from the shop because we need to make money and I’m too stubborn to pay for my food there after working that hard all day. Complicated. Luckily my share of the tip money (which I didn’t expect to get–that was kind) covered dinner. Woo.

At the shop I am working with Noah’s former partner. The one he was dating when he and I originally met. It was quite smooth. She has a very cheerful professional “face”. If she has a problem with me it was totally absent from her training me for the job. I wouldn’t say I felt comfortable but there is no way that I can say that any discomfort I felt was her fault. I was really impressed with watching her as an employee. That woman works like a demon. She takes pride in where she works. (Not this whole Gay Pride weekend stuff.) If something needs to be done she up and does it. She doesn’t wait for anyone else. She certainly doesn’t wait to be told what to do. I’m quite glad the coffee shop has her. I doubt we would have made it this far this year without people who just up and do things like she does.

It was kind of funny. When I got there an employee I don’t know was the only one working. I introduced myself as one of the owners and asked what work needed to be done. She gave me tasks and it worked out. She kind of fished around for how I got involved. I told her I met R many years ago at Shibaricon and then I ran TNG4 with him. D and I knew one another in junior college–we met when I was sixteen. She expressed surprise. Oh! Then you do know these people. Because she has never seen me around it is hard to understand that I existed all that time. Ha.

I like talismans. I like fetishes (in the traditional sense not in the modern “kinky” version). “An inanimate object worshiped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit” Like that. Noah and I do not have a formal all-the-time d/s or m/s relationship. We play with power exchange occasionally but it isn’t a formal all the time part of our life. This means that I have strong feelings about collars. 


In the bdsm world that I grew up in there are signals. Signs that help people understand how to relate to one another. Different collars are used in different ways. The thing is, this varies by person. I have seen patterns emerge but there are always people who break the pattern. Nevertheless I observe trends. I have given away most of the collars I shared with Tom. He wished that I gave them back so he could reuse them. I said hell would freeze over first. You are a rich guy. Fucking replace it if you care so much. No you may not use my god damn collars on your long-line of women. Just no. Anonymous people with little-to-no-connection can have them with pleasure. Enjoy them. I still have some collars we shared. I don’t think I will ever have them around my neck again.


When I am going out to a bdsm event and I do not want to be hit on I have to think about signaling. I have a Big Shiny Wedding Ring quite on purpose but in the poly world it doesn’t matter much. In the bdsm world many people are at least open to playing with many people even if they won’t have sex with them. If you represent yourself as property then you aren’t approached as much. People have to feel really fucking confident that it’s ok before they ask to play. And they don’t do things that are pushing my boundaries because they want to respect my partner. It’s hilarious. People don’t seem to care if they offend me but if I look like property they want to not offend my owner. Fuck all y’all.


So I wore a shiny padlock on my sternum. It’s a very simple, old fashioned sort of collar. Dog choke chains make a statement. It’s been a long time since I have gone out in public making this sort of statement. I notice that I have a different kind of wariness now. I assume I am invisible now. I feel like I have learned better camouflage as prey. I no longer feel hunted a large percentage of the time. The space I take up in the world has changed.


I have spent a lot of my life moving from place to place. I always meet people easily. Looking friendly and approachable was part of how I had friends at all. People see me from across the room and come over to say, “You look like a good person to talk to.” I can generally talk to just about anyone. I am quick with words. Part of this was because I was in the habit of scoping every room I was in for people to have sex with. It makes you look friendly. Seriously. You smile a lot. I don’t do it any more. I can feel my facial expression. I always look harried an frustrated. Ha. Harried and frustrated looks like it might bite your head off, not give you a pleasant chat.


I spend my life in a very small and secluded sphere. I live in my role of “mom” for the vast majority of my time. Even given how much time I spend on that role I give it a disproportionate amount of energy compared to any and every other thing I have done. I am no longer hunting. It’s quite simple, really. I am not looking for lovers but I’m also not looking for friends. I have a full roster right now and I don’t even feel the need to particularly seek out new acquaintances. People will wander into and out of places I am standing. I don’t feel the need to chase them any more. I don’t need to fill up idle hours of my life. I’d give anything to have more idle hours. Oy.


I have no interest in modeling m/s or d/s while my kids are little. I want them to see a partnership. I want them to think that women are bad ass, not obedient. I want my kids to see an actual long term partnership. Staying together is important to me. People get distracted and unhappy with one another and they turn to other relationships to keep things interesting. I want my kids to think that their parents find one another interesting. I want to spend a lot of time with Noah. I like him. Being near him and talking to him makes me feel far better than I have felt at any point in my life. There is no other person on this planet who is as willing to put a mountain of time and energy into me. I am special to him. If he took that energy and gave it to someone else I would know. It would be an active withdrawal. There is a limited amount of time and energy in this life. I have something really special. I want to nurture it, not ignore it.


I have learned a lot about being gentle from being with Noah. He is the only big-tough-guy I have ever dealt with who will actively tell me I am hurting him. He’s both extremely picky and not picky at all–meaning that he chooses when to talk about when he is feeling. He can endure things stoically like the next big-tough-guy. He just doesn’t do that with me. He thinks I shouldn’t hurt him. He doesn’t want to be hurt by me. So he tells me when and how I hurt him so that I can lean to do better. Mostly we don’t hurt each other any more. It’s rare to have a slip. I don’t even lick his nose.


I feel really glad that I get to model the relationship I have with Noah. Some day we will do more with other power structures because we want to. I really like that it will happen after many years of earning careful trust. In the modern USA “slavery” is kind of an ephemeral concept. It’s not real. It’s not binding. It’s a choice to have a conscious power structure with someone else. It’s just a consciously and specifically chosen relationship style. There are a lot of Father Is In Charge mentality left in this country, I’m not sure why people are surprised that people want to formalize this. The language is charged, yes. 


Right now I am using all of the caring-for-other-people energy I have for my children. They will not always need it and some day it will be unhealthy for me to pour this much energy into them all the time. I will still have this energy. I had this before I had kids. Noah spends a lot of time massaging me. He went to massage school as part of his learn-to-pick-up-chicks training. He really did go to school for how to be a better partner for me. I win. He also did hypnotherapy training. I’m totally going to be able to make him sound like a freakishly good fit when I write about him. I’m thinking about dialogue. I think I am hilarious. This will be a very different book to write.


I’m thinking very hard about what slavery meant to me. What did I do with Tom? How did that relationship fill my needs? I was under contract for two years. He ended that part of our relationship in a couples therapy session wherein the counselor told me that our problems were all my fault because I was asking too much of him by saying that he should follow the relationship rules of the contract we both signed. Needless to say, I felt quite good about myself at that point, right? That was when I started hounding him about kids. I was nearing the end of college. I had told him that I had no interest in getting married before I graduated from college. There was the strong implication that I wanted to get married after. He prevaricated for a while and pushed me to consider grad school. 


I decided I had two paths for teaching. If I was going to do the get married and have kids thing I should teach K-12 something. If I am going to “be a grown up” forever and build my life around the bdsm scene I should teach college so that I can be out. I decided to start the masters program first. Either way I didn’t feel qualified to teach much yet. I felt like there was some magical level of smart I would feel at some point and then I would be qualified to teach. I would know enough about a topic that I felt comfortable saying, “Yes! I know this!” It’s ironic that I failed the final test after years of getting good grades and being told I was good at this–writing, that is. Oh well.


I asked Tom if we could open our relationship in December of 2003. I didn’t technically have sex with anyone till January. I think I knew from the first person that I was hunting. I started the masters program first but I started the teaching credential the next term. I moved out of living with Tom in October about six weeks after I broke up with him. I started the credential and broke up with him at the same time. He would never answer the marriage and kids thing. So I disengaged. I threw that energy out into the world. I went hunting. I started dating Noah in February.


It’s going to be really fun to write about Noah. Knowing how this story goes it means that I am having an interesting time figuring out how to approach tone. This is going to be so different to write. How do I represent my time as a slave? What did I tell Tom? What kind of relationship was that?


I want to wear a lock on my sternum while I am working at Wicked Grounds because I want to announce that I am protected. I am wanted. Someone has already found me. When I was part of those communities I was always hunting. Always willing to say yes. It changed how I talked to people. In the past I have had issues with men taking liberties. I want to discourage it. Signaling is complicated.


I have been raped at a public sex party. I’m aware that it happens. A coffee shop isn’t a sex party. But I have had people casually touch my breasts. I have had people grab my ass. These actions aren’t “rape” but I’m kind of a ticking time bomb. One of these times I am going to break something on someones body as a result of them grabbing me. And it will probably escalate from there and be “all my fault”, right? I’m scared. I don’t like that I am scared. It is very hard for me to be in places I think of as hunting territory when I am not hunting. I feel physically sick. I feel scared. I am going to bring any fetish of protection I have.


Slavery is a way of acknowledging that someone is that interested in me. Different people do slavery differently. I’ll write more about that later. It’s time to start getting ready. Today will be a long day. I need to bring a water bottle and specifically drain it every so often. I think I was dehydrated yesterday. I know I was hungry. I ran five miles yesterday morning before working on my feet for seven hours making food and washing dishes. I ate a bowl of oatmeal, a thin slice of quiche… and that wall before dinner. By which time I was starving and had a raging headache. I think I should take better care of my body today. Today is supposed to be a “cross training” day. I hope this counts. I hope it will be fun. I had fun yesterday. It was fucking awesome to get to talk to people with a counter between us so they couldn’t touch me. I have serious issues. Whatever. It worked. I felt safe. I felt like I was doing something and I had a place and a purpose. I was using some of my caring-for-other-people energy on that community. Twelve years is a long time. I’m not gone. I’m on sabbatical. I’m training for my next relationship. It will be very different to use more of that energy on Noah. I feel specifically spooked. 


And I should go take a shower. 

My local bdsm community; or Sex is complicated.

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When I’m not writing I have a harder time remembering my resolutions and I don’t feel like I make progress in “processing” because I just say the same thing over and over. I like to pretend that when I write I occasionally mix it up and say different things and reach new-to-me conclusions or connections. This is what I tell myself to justify my continual verbal diarrhea.

My kind of rough plan at this point (in my head so far) is that I will finish editing a friend’s book by the end of June (I’m honest about my limited time available for such work) and then I need to start editing No Secrets again because I would like to put the kickstarter up during the summer. I think it would be nice to have it end on my birthday. After I see if I can get funding for a print edition (so I don’t have to front all the money [that I don’t have]) [incidentally–the ebook has paid for the editor and has mostly paid for the ISBN number. It’s only been out for nearly three months. I’m thrilled.] I will deal with that. Then I can turn my full attention to Part Two. If Noah says it is ok I want to spend October doing pre-writing stuff and then see if NaNoWriMo is sufficiently inspirational again this year. What do you think, Noah?

It’s hard trying to work on multiple projects in my head at once. Things get kind of muddled. Although I have to say that editing my friend’s book right now is ideal in terms of making me think about how I want to phrase things in Part Two (capitalized because for the moment it is the working title and that makes it a proper noun–I’m kind of obsessed with thinking about when capitol letters are appropriate right now).

I’m thinking about the bdsm community. What am I going to choose to write about? How am I going to show what happened? I don’t want this to be another “telling” book. I want this book to do more showing of what happened and that means cherry picking experiences I had and creating dialogue for them. Dialogue scares the shit out of me. I don’t want to remember something differently than someone else and be called a liar. Instead I will call it fiction and improvise freely to make my point. I’M NOT ACTUALLY SAYING YOU SAID IT. SEE IT’S FICTION!!! That’s my motto right now. And yes, I am yelling it in my head.

I came into a very particular community at a very particular time. I traveled a great deal during the four years I was heavily involved in the bdsm scene. I got to find out that people in Australia and England and the East Coast of the US treats things quite differently people do in the bay area. Holy moly the Seattle scene is different. And Portland was different again. There are a bunch more cities I could list off but that seems silly. I got out of my bubble as often as possible. At the time I don’t think I knew I was trying to learn bdsm in a studying kind of way. I wanted to find out what it meant to different people.

I only knew what my local community taught me at first. That was a fairly biased starting point. I went to the Wednesday munch in Palo Alto for four years. I rarely missed a munch in that time period. I went religiously. It is the longest period of my life of having an intensive social experience. I have certainly known people for longer than that–Britt and Jenny are the best examples of that. We have come-and-go relationships and we have rarely spent all that much time together. I saw the Wednesday munch crowd (there was a sizable ‘normal’ crowd) at least weekly and often more than once a week. That’s a lot of contact for me.

When I try to think of how to describe the crowd I am struck by how afraid I am. Most of the folks who still hang out near the munch like me well enough. I don’t want to fuck that up by writing about the experience I had. I don’t want them to know that sometimes they weren’t very nice to me and they didn’t even know they were doing something challenging. I’m pretty sure that folks were trying to be nice to me. It isn’t their fault I am damaged. I came pre-fucked up.

I’m beating around the bush and wasting time. Most of the folks who were part of that social group can be charitably described as being socially awkward. When you get together and hang out with people for years and years just because you all like deviant sex you are going to have an odd group. People different types of deviant sex, by and large. My opinion is that community focus comes about through a sort of peer pressure and exposure. Themes emerge. Seattle is known for blood play and suspension. In Australia they talk about “performing” and many people in their community will not play in private. They think it all must be done on a stage in front of an audience or you are weird for doing it. I thought that was hilarious.

In Palo Alto when I was part of the crowd there was a heavy emphasis on straight up fetish gear (mostly latex though no one scorned leather or pvc) and pushing people to the edge of their pain limits. The crowd really thrived on trying to break people. Not everyone. Just the loudest players who played the most often.

I get the impression that many of the people who were there for the social aspects were not looking to be bad ass players but they certainly were happy to egg the conversation on. I spent a lot of time there knowing that I was mostly attractive because of my age and willingness to do whatever someone wanted me to. I don’t play with safewords. In general that just means I don’t say no regardless of what someone wants to do.

But I’m really harsh and abrasively defensive with everyone I don’t want to play with. I think that got worse not better over the years of spending so much time in La Dolce Vita (the name of the café the munch was in). The group was very dismissive of the intelligence of women. Most of the men in the crowd worked in tech. Almost none of the women were computer people. As a female friend said to me years ago (roughly paraphrased because the passage of time is like that): “Of course they treat you like you are stupid. You don’t even work in the computer field.” If you aren’t a geek you are shit. Check. Got it. I wonder why I have such a fucking chip on my shoulder about the topic.

I had a bunch of men I would talk to. I did have female friends but they tended to pay less focused attention to me. The men appreciated me sitting on their laps and being flirtatious. Most of the men in that crowd had virtually zero traditional sex in their lives. I find that fascinating. There were a fair number of single guys who were single for many years and some married guys who had wives who just… didn’t. I was quite happy to fill their need for feeling interesting  and wanted. I’m not very good at talking to men without acting out in a somewhat sexual manner. All of a sudden I was the best thing ever.  It’s not that I was ever that hot, I’m not, and it’s not that I was ever going to fuck them, I didn’t, but I looked hard at them. I got to know them and had a consistent relationship. It was quite lovely in a variety of ways.

I’m willing to bet they would still enjoy having a friendship with me even if I didn’t sit on their laps and uhm move about. I have always had issues with compulsive sexual acting out. I was really grateful that Tom told me early on he wanted monogamy. I got to stop having to follow through on my teasing. I could tell people in advance that I was in a monogamous relationship so what I was doing had limits. When you are talking to men who aren’t getting any sexual activity and you say you will tease but not go all the way they get to make the decision and avoid anger. It stays friendly and light. They don’t start getting more interested and pushing. Monogamy gave me a lot of freedom. These guys were all good friends with my boyfriend and they had known him first. They weren’t going to push my limits because they didn’t want to step on Tom’s toes.

Once I broke up with Tom and moved around the community a bit more freely I had several sexual assaults in a short period of time. I think my local community is quite misogynistic. It is my experience that men who aggressively want violent sex often have no interest in asking for consent first because they would risk hearing “no”. Fetishists are different. Most fetishists (in my little corner of the world–who knows about your corner of the world) are not particularly aggressive about sex. There is a lot of bdsm play that lives in this weird gray area of sensory experience that feels unrelated to ones genitals. It may be pleasurable to each individual but they shouldn’t be sharing that feeling. It’s about them each having the body experience they want. Being encased from head to foot in latex makes sex basically impossible. Sure you can do some masturbation, but who counts that?

My local community had a bizarre focus on no-sex. Bdsm is not about sex! It’s a “hobby”. It’s members are enthusiasts. I know it wasn’t just Tom. I went to a party every month with this crowd. I think I can count on my fingers how many times anyone had sex at one of those parties. I went to more than fifty of those parties. If I count up all of the times someone was having sex and I was not involved the numbers fit on one hand with room to spare. That’s kind of odd for an event that is ostensibly sex focused.

That was where I spent my early adulthood in the sex community. I found a no-sex ghetto. It was hilarious. It was really weird to me that I managed to find the group that didn’t have sex. It massively shaped my attitude about bdsm. It has been a weird journey to try and combine the two. Noah is the sort who doesn’t play without sex. Sex is the point. That other stuff is kind of interesting for a bit but really we are here for sex. Let’s not kid ourselves.

It is a night and day contrast. Tom and I had sex in fewer than 5% of our scenes. Roughly. I didn’t actually count. We just didn’t have much sex. Sex was different. I think that sex was too emotionally vulnerable. He doesn’t like being vulnerable. With sex you can’t control a lot of it. Bodies are unpredictable. Tom has trouble orgasming. He doesn’t really do it any way other than masturbating by himself. Having a partner there is distracting. I am a competitive person and I learned how to get him off through oral and vaginal sex. I know I can count the number of times I achieved those goals on my fingers. It was too hard, honestly. Over an hour of oral sex makes your jaw hurt something fierce. Tom has an enormous cock. It hurts no matter where he puts it. Sex was really complicated.

So I lived in this strange world where people liked having me around to wear fetish gear in front of them because they liked seeing it and I was appreciated for hinting at sex and not delivering. It was a strange period in my life.

Tom wanted me to learn how to tie him up. He likes the experience. I was under contract so I couldn’t say no. I didn’t want to learn how to top. I was correct in assuming that once I was known for having those skills I would be asked to do them a lot. I have no sexual interest in having someone helpless. Just not my kink. But I have a lot of interest in meeting my friends’ needs and helping them have happier lives. I topped a lot. I’m sure it was a mixed bag experience for people because I’m an inconsistent top. I either broadcast that I’m doing this because I feel like I have to (how sexy is that? not at all) or I ask people how/where they want to be pushed. I like doing very intense scenes both as a top and as a bottom.

When I top I only do a few activities. I’m a very competent suspension top. I certainly can and do floor bondage on occasion but I really prefer suspension where possible. For me it is about the trust involved. Tying someone up on the floor always leaves me thinking, “Oh shit what now?” I often feel uncomfortable touching people. I don’t know what the fuck to do. I’ve never figured it out well. I was taught it wasn’t about sex so I feel uncomfortable going there. Not to mention that I don’t find submissive people sexually attractive so… yeah. I don’t want to go after peoples genitals. I actually did a lot of sex play with Tom when he was tied up. That was the big exception. (I swear to God I have asked for permission to talk about this at least three times and he says it is ok.) He liked doing the forced feminization then getting tied up and “taken” thing. I feel bad about these events in a variety of ways. He wanted to be forced to be like a woman (which I have weird feminist feelings about) and then raped. Lots of men fantasize about what it is like to have this happen.

I have this really uncomfortable set of emotions around these men thinking it might be fun to have my life for a few hours. I know that there are people who have never been raped who do rape play. I have mixed feelings about people thinking that rape is hot. There are things about rape that are hot, I get that. Power imbalance feels sexy. It’s just one way of imagining a power imbalance.

I imagine it would feel different for a woman who has never been raped to dress her boyfriend up in a dress and sodomize him. I have a whole complex swirl of emotions around, “See. I’m supposed to like it when people “rape” me. Obviously I am just interpreting things wrong in other situations in my life. I was supposed to enjoy them. Does that mean I am bad because I didn’t enjoy it when Jeremy sodomized me? Am I broken? Was I just not quite big enough? What? What did I do wrong?”

For me to do rape play as the top I have to play very carefully close to becoming my father. These things just pass right along don’t they?

And he didn’t want to be raped “as a man”. He wanted to be forced to be something weaker. Something that could be raped. I have some complex fucking emotions around that. The biggest part of me tries to believe that it is ok for people to have whatever sexual predilections they have. I just don’t need to do it with them.

I spent years at that munch listening to the loud, overbearing men lecture me about Libertarianism (I still haven’t resigned my party affiliation), cars, guns, and computers. I was welcome to develop an active interest in all of the above with them. If I had a dissenting opinion I could either deal with being shouted down (and called a bitch) or keep my fucking mouth shut. I learned to keep my mouth shut. Tom and I didn’t argue very much. We got along very well. I didn’t say a lot.

I sat on their laps and flirted and was looked at while not talking. That was what I was wanted for. That is what I felt was wanted from me. They haven’t made a lot of effort to continue to know me. When I broke up with Tom I stopped going to the munch and the monthly party. That was his space. Apparently all of those friends were his friends too. I didn’t try real hard to pull anyone out of the crowd with me and they haven’t tried to stay in contact with me. Several of them have given me half-hearted “sure we should do dinner some time” shit. When I ask for a date I get brushed off with, “I’m really busy right now and I will get back to you”. Crickets.

I didn’t really want to be the fetish doll for the rest of my life. I want to be allowed to have dissenting opinions without being told I am a bitch. I asked him flat out, “If I was a guy would you call me an asshole for saying that?”
“No. I wouldn’t call him anything. I would just think he had strong opinions.”
“Then why did you call me a bitch?”
“Because you are one.”

Why do I want monogamy with Noah? Because when I ran into that guy fairly recently I totally offered to have sex with him. I have thought about it for many years. So I told him flat out that I thought about it. For the record I did this before we agreed to monogamy. I have withdrawn all of the offers I was flinging out left and right.

I think it is time for me to move on to a new stage in life where I can recognize that people who only want to spend time with me because I will have sex with them are people I don’t actually need in my life. I have gone literally my entire life using sex as a way of developing relationships. I have a very hard time having contact with people without feeling like I owe them something for putting up with my company and I have so little to offer.

I can see Shanna figuring out how to organize groups of kids to engage in play she directs. It’s fascinating to watch. It gives me a lot of insight into how and when I locked on to sex as a coping strategy. I think that it wouldn’t have worked as well if I had been in one place. You run out of people eventually. Or you end up in cyclical patterns with one abusive partner. I had endless people to try out my opening moves on. It means I didn’t have to do the uncomfortable work of trying something else in order to make friends. I just did the same thing over and over again. When whatever sexual relationship I arranged kind of fizzled out I was dropped like a hot potato. I was usually not acknowledged again while I lived in that place.

I need to stop fucking people because then I feel shamed out of communities. I feel like if I am no longer offering up sexual interaction I don’t have a lot to offer. So I shut my mouth and feel unwanted and I leave.

There is a new family in our homeschooling group. The mom has moved a lot all her life. I’ve been talking to her about displacement and getting to know new people. It’s really interesting. She doesn’t have any abuse in her background. Her family isn’t warm but they aren’t abusive.

I have totally glossed over the beating part of bdsm so far. I grew up in the “hit her harder” school of thought. We were a crowd of very heavy players and we felt distinct pride about that. I showed up to this crowd when I was eighteen. I spent my nineteenth birthday feeling like I didn’t get to say no when everyone at the party wanted to line up to hit me. I never did a group spanking thing again. After that I learned that I was allowed to say no.

But you have to be careful. You can have rules like “I’m monogamous” because of course guys recognize that some guys are possessive of their pussy. But you have to be as available as someone else wants or you are a bitch. Telling guys no makes them hate you. There is a fine line between not looking like a good person to ask (and being roundly ignored as a result) and looking absolutely available. If he has the nerve to ask you really should say yes. You wouldn’t want to be part of the Embargo, now would you?

Sexual longing is so big. It encompasses so much of who a person is. My munch was full of male fetishists (there are not nearly as many women who are into it) who didn’t have sex. Either because they couldn’t because they didn’t have a willing partner or because they didn’t enjoy it that much. Sometimes I feel like a liar when I identify myself as part of the sex community. There wasn’t much fucking going on. But the needs came from similar places. Instead we encased one another in latex or rope. We beat the shit out of one another and called it love. “I know you have a need to feel pain, let me help you with that.”

I have a hard time with going to parties and not playing. I don’t play because I want to, exactly. I play because I feel compelled to. I feel compelled to meet someones needs. Either they want to hurt me or they want to be hurt. I don’t really play with people anymore unless they manage to hit that button. Well, uhm, before that monogamy switch. Ahem.

I don’t know how to channel this with Noah. I’m really struggling. I know that part of it is that I’m having a weird psychological reaction to the fact that I shouldn’t feel shame about what Noah and I do. What we do is given the thumbs up by every legal, moral, and ethical standpoint one can have. We have remarkably vanilla, standard PIV (penis in vagina) sex.

I’m not really a deviant any more. Was I ever one? I struggle with that. I think I wanted what I did when I was younger. But why did I run so hard and so far away from it? Why did I go find a partner who would not be capable of playing out similar roles with me forever? I often feel like I do things wrong for Noah. I’m not very good at the things he prefers. I feel like I am better suited to being in a relationship where I am continually silenced because then my depression is apparently entirely invisible.  Isn’t that better? No? I don’t know.

I haven’t been hit to the point of getting a bruise in a long time. It used to be my main hobby. Well, the bruise wasn’t entirely the point. We all loved comparing our bruises though. It was proof that we could handle it. That we liked intense play. We wanted to bear the intensity that someone else wanted to dish out. That proved how submissive we were. I don’t want that shit any more. I’m tired of having to accept pain in order to prove I like someone. If you fucking like me, don’t hurt me.

But but… it gets me off. Really. I’m having a hard time with how difficult it is to get off if I am not in pain. I’ve had a long life to acclimate to believing that I should experience pain as a normal part of sexual activity and I am supposed to shut up about it and smile. And get off. Because then it is better for the person hurting me. They have proof that what they are doing is justified.

I have a lot of complex feelings about that time in my life. I used to put up personal ads for girls. They would come over and we would have awesome, wild, vanilla sex and then they would go away and never be seen again. That was the only way I could have sex that wasn’t painful at that point in my life. Tom was simply too large to ever be comfortable. It always hurt. I just didn’t talk about it. He didn’t really know. And I am god damn good actress. I should have been in porn. I pretend sex is awesome better than most people.

Tom never ever once pushed past me actually saying “no”. Our relationship existed entirely within the realm of me actively consenting to what happened to me. Most of the time I scripted the play. He told me what porn websites he liked (insex.com was his very favorite) and I spent a lot of my free time looking at the pictures trying to figure out what I could handle doing. I tried to write a story with those pictures in my head. I would then tell him the story and how I wanted to play and he would do it. I picked a lot of really brutal play. I’m always interested in proving that I can take pain. At least these days I have gotten over punching games.

For a long time it felt like I was building towards the goal of being able to take enough pain that I could lie on the floor unable to stand and still say, “Beige”.

I want to be hurt. Deep inside me I want to hurt. I want to feel pain more than I want to breathe. Tom and I had a system that worked for several years. When I was getting antsy I didn’t talk about what I was feeling, I asked for a beating. It kept me distracted. Focusing on my beatings was far more socially acceptable than cutting. This way I got to be cool at the same time instead of a damaged little freak. I don’t think it was good for me to hang out with the “hit her harder” camp. I am very competitive in my head.

I feel the need to point out that I know people who take way more intense beatings than I ever have or want to. That’s ok! I’m done trying to climb that ladder. I don’t want to be the biggest masochist. I think I only need to be picked up by my pectoral muscles before being shaken like a dog once. I thought I was going to lose my mind from pain. I couldn’t get away from it. It was every where. It chased me through every back corner of my mind and screamed pain and pain and pain. Giving birth was not that painful. During labor I always had a corner of my mind that I could hide in for brief breaks. (Unmedicated home birth, for the record. After nine days of labor. I hemorrhaged and almost died. It was festive.)

I think I am comfortable saying that I have had the most intense scenes I ever want to have. I’m done climbing that mountain. Those were my personal peaks. I want to not go anywhere near them again. That was a very dark and scary place for me. I don’t think that all masochists have as little respect for their bodies as I do for mine but I am not that sturdy. I didn’t really enjoy all that much of it. I was way past the point when I was doing it for my own masochism. I like to play with sadists. Actual sadists. The kind who like it best when their partner genuinely isn’t having fun. They are willing to really hurt me. After all the years of cutting I have done it seemed kind of ridiculous for me to explore the lighter side of beatings. I didn’t bother. I like single tail whips. I like having my flesh ripped open. I like canes that leave welts that last for weeks. If I don’t have long-term reminders it is like it never happened. It is like I am not serving my purpose.

Noah and I have a hard doing sm play together. It’s complicated.

I wish I knew what I wanted from sex. I wish I had a better understanding of what parts I am doing because I like them. What I like is that my partner is having fun. But that’s a lie. There is stuff I wish Noah did. I haven’t really been talking about them so I can’t get mad at him for not doing them. I consider that to be an inconvenient proviso for life. I can’t get mad at people for not reading my mind. I’m not sure how to find enough time to think about this in my life. I don’t think about sex much when my kids are around. That is just off-limits for me. I’m with them so much that I don’t have a lot of hours of the day when I am able to think about sex. I don’t feel like I am finding a way to figure out new things. I am stuck on old tapes because holy crisco I don’t need something else to be working on really intensely in my personal life.

This is how these things die. They become not a priority. I don’t know how to maintain balance and give everything in my life the attention it deserves. I’m not big enough. I look out at the next few years and see no sign of increased time for sex. Not really. Not for many years, probably. Between the kids and other things that pull our energy I just don’t see much happening. This is how bed death happens.

We still have sex a few times most weeks. We do skip weeks. It’s just not that high of a priority. Too many conflicting factors have to be in alignment. And then we are too tired to do anything all that exciting. I like the intimacy of sex a great deal or I wouldn’t be having it at all right now. Physically it is sometimes annoying and we have an understanding that I “take one for the team” at times. This is part of that sex that women don’t exactly want but they have any way.

This is so complicated. I love Noah. I want him to be happy with me. Noah loves me and wants me to be happy. We are trying to walk a very narrow line between his interest in having sex daily (and sex where I protest is really fairly hot) and the fact that being actually raped over and over again isn’t ok.

I have to get something out of it too. It doesn’t have to be the same thing he gets. If I don’t get anything at all out of it, then I shouldn’t be doing it. I’m ok with the fact that life has some weird trade offs. I get to pick what the hill is this time. I don’t have to have one goal at all times. I don’t get off very often. I know that I can predictably do that if I tell him how to inflict pain. I generally don’t want to feel pain so I don’t ask him to do that. As a result my body is dramatically less responsive and I often feel physically kind of uncomfortable during the act. But I love knowing that I am meeting his needs. This is something that he really needs in order to be a happy person. He will still be here whether I put out or not. But he will be sad and withdrawn. He won’t feel very loved. He will feel rejected. He doesn’t ask me for sex. I have to initiate the vast majority of our sex. I spend every day looking at him. When he is sad, I know I need to.

This sex stuff is so complicated. Noah and I are a good match largely because of the way we have complimentary compulsive sexual behavior. Woo. And we really are learning how to be nice to each other. He likes having sex with me when I’m fighting but he doesn’t push for it. He certainly doesn’t initiate it. I have to verbally request it. Usually by saying, “I want to wrestle and lose.” He perks up more than a child on Christmas.

Noah is my provider. He is my protector from the big bad world in some very material ways. Yes it is hot for him to feel like he is strong. He really isn’t the type to get into sports or other public ways of proving his manliness. He’s a geek. He’s realistic. But he does notice that he needs to work on getting stronger because I’m about to beat him.

It’s very complicated, this liking to lose. This liking of pain. It’s all wrapped up. It’s all wrapped up in thinking that taking pain is required of me. That I am only interesting if I am taking pain of some sort.

I didn’t start talking about my childhood in a public way until after I had mostly retreated from the public scene. They people I had all of my adult relationships with in the bdsm community knew very little about me. I think I talked to a few people one on one a little. I had a few conversations with motherly women. I had female mentors.

That’s all the time for today.

Irrational feelings.

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This is ridiculous. I am so angry with Tom I can barely see straight. I feel like I am getting angry with him for all the not-getting-angry I did during our four year relationship. He’s a fucking bully and I let him walk all over me for four years. I remember chanting in my head, “It’s not worth an argument.” That was how I got through most days.

===============================

I love Saturdays. Saturdays are the best days. Today he is going to stay home. I miss him. I’ve missed him all week. This new company takes a lot out of him. Twelve hour workdays are short.

It’s only eight. He won’t be up for hours. I should probably go downstairs and find something to do to amuse myself until ten or eleven when he will start waking up. I’m kind of sick of doing homework, but what the hell. This week I’m working on Taming of the Shrew. It seems apropos. I’m working on a D/s interpretation of the story. How do I convince the teacher that Kate really likes being stomped on. It gives her structure and safety. I understand that. Tom gives me that. He tells me what the rules are. He gives me a frame so I can be safe and know what to do.

“Hey! You’re up! I’m working on an interesting paper right now, do you want to hear about it?”
“Not really. What am I having for breakfast?”
“Oh. Uhm, would you like eggs and toast?”
“Yeah. And a Coke.” He flipped the tv on. Oh look. Blazing Saddles. Again.

I walked into the kitchen and started cooking. He was laughing before the opening scene was finished.

“Man. These guys really know how to act!” He laughed uproariously, again.

“Here is your breakfast.”
“Thanks.”
“So I’m trying to figure out how to explain that Kate, from Taming of the Shrew, really likes the D/s in her relationship. I found a neat article in Skin 2–that latex fetishist magazine–that has a paper written by a professor from Oxford and ”
“Can’t you see I’m watching a movie?”

I lapse back into silence. I miss him so much and he is sitting right in front of me. All I want to do is share with him what I have been thinking about all week. I’m trying to find the words to talk to him about our relationship. I want to understand why I feel happier in this relationship than I felt with my family. But right now I just feel sad.

“I’m going to go upstairs.”
“That’s fine. I’m going to watch my movie.”

I go to our bedroom and open my upper drawer. The piece of cloth is shoved into the corner. Then I pick up the cloth and unroll it. I take a deep breath before grasping the scalpel firmly. I go in the bathroom and shut the door. I put the scalpel inside the bath tub.

It is so hard doing what he wants. I am a bad slave. I am impertinent and needy. I look in the mirror at myself. I stare as hard as I can.

“Shut up, Kristine. Shut up, Kristine. Shut up, Kristine. No one gives a shit what you fucking think. Shut up, Kristine.”

I turn around and climb into the bath tub. I shut the shower door completely. I run the bath water until the tub is completely full. I lean back against the wall and close my eyes. I can feel tears running down my face. It takes me a couple of moments to find the courage.

I make my cuts very carefully. From downstairs I hear the television say, “Mornin’, ma’am. And isn’t it a lovely mornin'” Tom drowned out the television as he roared, “Up yours, nigger!” and laughed. I fucking hate that movie. I’m allowing it to break my concentration so I shook my head quickly and started humming and then singing to myself so that I wouldn’t be distracted by the noise. I like a song I learned with the Seventh Day Adventist youth group.

“Father I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you.
Jesus I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you.
Spirit I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you.”

It is meant to be sung in rounds in a group. I use it to help me focus on the sensation of the cutting. My other senses don’t have to be as engaged. I want to be very careful. I can’t cut too deeply because that would scar and get attention. I need the wounds to heal quickly. I take my clothes off in front of other people at least once a month. I don’t want to draw attention to this so I am very cautious. I just barely break the skin. I cut barely until I get blood. Thin little cuts like these heal quickly and without a mark for me. I start on my upper right thigh. I like to start horizontally. I make cuts around three inches long. I make them slowly and carefully. I breathe deeply the whole time. I keep singing. In the background Tom is still laughing, or laughing again. I don’t know or care which.

When I am done there are usually three or four patches on my legs. They are usually three inches by five or seven inches depending on how hard the week was for me emotionally. I usually judge when to stop by how bloody the water is. I like to take breaks in the middle of cutting to play in the blood. I like the swirls in the water. The more blood I take out the less likely I am to do something stupid. What I mean by “something stupid” is try to flash my marks at someone. I know it is not ok to acknowledge I do this. I will get in trouble again. If I just have a couple of small marks high up on my thighs I might wear a short skirt or get out of the shower and walk around naked for a few minutes. When I make more and more marks I know how to adapt my behavior and I don’t take the risk of being caught. Tom doesn’t mind me wearing tights and long dresses all the time so it is easy to hide. We almost never have sex so it really doesn’t matter what happens to my body in between.

Eventually I stop cutting and lean back and cry. I don’t even know why I am crying. But I hurt so much. The cutting isn’t what hurts, but it gives me an excuse to cry. I’ll take it.

After even longer I stop crying and pull the drain plug. I watch my blood go down the drain. I get up and rinse off quickly. I dry off and get dressed in thick tights and an ankle length dress. I walk down stairs and sit down at the floor near Tom’s feet with my school books. Even though he doesn’t want to talk to me I miss him so much that I can’t bear to be away from him.

It’s not until he says, “Can’t you ever shut up?” that I realize that I’m still singing the song under my breath.

“Father I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you. Jesus I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you. Spirit I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you.”

Memory lane

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I had dinner with my ex last night. That was interesting. I asked him a lot of questions and he answered as best he could. I told him point blank that I’m glad the kids thing worked out or I would have kicked myself for the rest of my life for leaving him. I actually kind of wonder if he lost a little bit of his sparkle for me last night. I think I had forgotten a lot of things. His opinion is the only opinion. I remember why we didn’t argue: I bit my tongue a lot. There was no point in discussing controversial topics because he has already made up his mind and he will be condescending, dismissive, and really pretty rude the entire time you talk about something that isn’t his thing. For example: organic farming. He believes it is going to be the destruction of the human race. He won’t talk about the problems from animal feed lots or mono-crops. He thinks there aren’t any problems. Right. I let it go because I don’t care about converting him.

Noah listens to any crack brained thing I bring up in a polite way and when he is doubtful he carefully says, “Can I see some of where you found this information?” If I’m using an idiotic source he lets me down gently. It’s nice to be reminded that for the first time in my life I live with someone who genuinely thinks of me as an intelligent person. I had forgotten. I had forgotten how much everyone before him made me feel like I should shut up and sit down and just let them speak because they are smarter than me. I didn’t always do it but I felt it.

There has been a lot of research lately on how hard it is to change peoples minds. The less smart someone is the more likely they are to be really entrenched in everything they know. Holy crap Tom is narrow minded. He knows what he knows and believes there is no validity in any point of view he disagrees with. It’s fascinating.

He wants to live in a Sci Fi future. He thinks things will be every increasingly technical and people will move to increasingly thinking jobs. I think that is folly. If you look a distribution of intelligence, 50% of people are below average. You really think that everyone in the world should sit on their ass and do a computer job? Really? Not all of us would even enjoy that let alone be capable. I think we should be encouraging people to work more with their bodies if they show the slightest inclination. We are a nation of people who are desperately unfit and unhealthy. The solution is not more sloth.

He wants to have fun. He doesn’t want to create anything in particular. His job is creative enough for him. Every year or so he has a new hardware design project. He is designing things that use basically entirely outside components. He’s figuring out how to assemble the right configuration of after market parts. He doesn’t have much desire to really grow the business. He wants to keep very busy (he’s a work-a-holic in my “I lived with him” opinion) at work and make a lot of money so he can have more and more fun. That means racing his Porsche, tying up and sexually controlling women, and working. I told him to go get a vasectomy so he can make damn sure he never accidentally ends up a parent because he wouldn’t be a good one.

Tom is a just fine person. I think I just got over him romantically. It was sudden. I no longer look up to him. He doesn’t have a talent or a skill I respect any more. That was weird to notice. I am now how old he was when we met. I feel disappointed looking at what he has done with his life in the last twelve years since we met. He doesn’t have to give a shit about my disappointment, in fact he doesn’t. He has enjoyed his life. He wants to keep doing the same shit for another thirty or forty years before he croaks. He is perfectly happy. Another woman will always come along, right? SM is more interesting with new people any way. I don’t want that life and I’m really glad I only stayed for four years. I have now been married for longer than I dated Tom. Noah is a larger influence on my character than Tom was. I’m glad for that.

I asked Tom what it was like living with someone as crazy as me. He said he was unaware of it. I cried alone and he didn’t know it existed. He didn’t know I was unstable.

I cut and was suicidal a great deal while I lived with him. I was still interacting with my family a fair bit. I was quite unstable. He didn’t notice. He didn’t fucking notice. You have got to be fucking kidding me. Seriously? You are that self-involved? You never noticed that your partner of four years was unstable emotionally? It makes me think I should feel a lot more confident in my acting skills. Maybe I am even harder to read than Noah says. I cultivate being hard to read. I practice. Really. I do not want to give away the intensity of my emotions when I am around people. It’s dangerous to be noticed for your strong emotions. I didn’t know I was that good though. Tom remembers that we had a lot of fun and got along well. That’s good.

Tom has never read any of my writing. He doesn’t want to know what goes on in my head. That may be brilliant of him. I didn’t understand how much my writing has always contained a plea for someone to read it and come talk to me about it. Noah does. Noah is the only fucking person who is interested in crawling as deeply into my head as possible. It was really wonderful to be reminded what it is like to be in the room with someone who requires me to have a brick wall between myself and him. Noah is interested in what I am thinking and feeling, pretty much at any point. Sometimes he is distracted with other bits of life but if I write it down and leave it for him he always catches up. He has read my entire archive on every blogging site I have ever used. Multiple times. That makes me cry. Oh my G-d he actually loves me. He thinks I am worth that kind of time and attention. I write a fuck ton and I’ve been blogging for over nine years. I need to poke around old storage disks and see if I can find my g-blog archive. I’m not sure if I still have it and that is sad. I should probably make another LJ book so that I have a copy of it. Other people write in paper journals and keep them.

All of a sudden I feel a little spark of interest in finding out what I actually like about bdsm. I spent a lot of time last night feeling like I’m just not a pervert any more. I have no interest in the kind of stuff Tom is into. I’m not interested in being degraded for someone else’s amusement any more. I think the joke is kind of thin at this point. Yes, yes, I know that I am disgusting and should suffer. Blah blah. I’m tired of the role I had to fill. I’m tired of having to denigrate my own thinking abilities in order to tolerate being bossed around by someone who is so not smarter than me. He knows different things than me and he believes that the only important things to know are the things he knows. He thinks my things aren’t worthy of much respect. That is probably hyperbole. He doesn’t bother to notice that my things are there so he doesn’t have to listen to me on any topic because I’m not very educated. Or something. “Sure I can “listen” to you blather on about something idiotic while I roll my eyes and don’t really listen.” It’s really very similar to how I feel with Alex. To be fair Alex has dramatically improved in this area in one on one conversations, in particular since he started working on it with his therapist. It’s still a thing.

Tom told me he hasn’t done Daddy/daughter play since me and he hasn’t been interested in rape play either. For all of the years I have known Noah he has been staunchly uninterested in Daddy/daughter play–not his kink. After he read the book and he understood the emotional power it has for me he is suddenly interested. Rape play has been a major component of our life. Tom didn’t think I was a fine instrument to be played. He wanted to have fun with a buddy. Noah is consciously working on helping me change because we both want me to. It was weird to understand that at this really deep level last night. Tom knows very little about me. He knows hand wavey bad stuff happened. He knows a few details and will admit knowing them after a lot of pressure. Holy shit. That is actually kind of amazing. I remember Tom’s life. I pieced it together very carefully. I have a whole timeline constructed in my head about his family and school experiences from very young. I wanted to know him so I could serve him better.

We went to McDonald’s a lot, probably every week. Tom wants to rest when he is at home. He wants to eat on the go as he dashes to and from work and parties. It’s a lifestyle. So one time I asked for chicken nuggets and he asked what kind of sauce I wanted. I responded with, “The usual” and he said, “What’s the usual?” and I could feel my face involuntarily fall. We had been dating for multiple years at that point. “Sweet and Sour.” There was some little flick of memory in his face as he recalled my voice saying that over and over for years in his memory. He looked kind of guilty but turned around to the cashier without saying anything.

If I walk into any restaurant with Noah that I have ever been to he can tell me which foods I enjoyed and for what reasons and which drinks I particularly liked or disliked. Sometimes he makes me cry. It’s kind of embarrassing in public. Noah knows what I like. I think that is the most amazing thing in the whole world. He pays so much attention to me. How can a human being be capable of paying so much attention to me? He has a catalog of my smiles. He knows what kinds of memories go with which expressions because he looks at me and asks what I am thinking over and over.

Having dinner with Tom was intense. And then not. And then it was kind of boring. I couldn’t have a conversation with him because he wasn’t interested in my point of view. He was dismissive and cold. He didn’t mean to be. He could speak perfectly politely as long as he could feel it was entirely “fun”.  He wanted to have an agreeable conversation and he was perfectly happy to bulldoze and be rude and ensure that I didn’t conversationally disagree with him. I am so happy that I now live with someone who values my opinions even when he doesn’t agree with me. It was really nice to see that I have found someone who suits me far better. I am glad I kept looking.

I have to go run.

Grief ritual

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I was surprised by how much crying I ended up doing for my family. It was different than I expected. I thought I was just here to mourn how shitty I was treated. Instead I cried and cried and cried for whatever happened to my different family members to cause them to become the kind of people who related to me the way they did. I cried for generations of women who were beaten and raped and told they had no alternative. They were to be seen and not heard.

I cried because my father must have felt a great deal of pain otherwise he wouldn’t have hurt so many people.  I had all these thoughts about his parents, whom I never knew.  What did they do to him as a child?  How did he come to believe that female family members were fair game for raping?  What I was told this weekend is each person has to deal with his/her family’s grief going back seven generations and what you incur in this life is going to be passed on for another seven generations.  Nieces/nephews count as the next generation.  Even if you don’t have children your karma can still be sent on for many many years.

I cried because my sister is so buried under her grief that she turned around and hurt her children.
Anger is healing and inspirational but if you don’t do something with the strength it gives you then you risk burning up in the flames.  Today I found a place in my heart for forgiveness for Denise.  I didn’t know I could do that.  It took me emotionally hitting a place where I realized just how young she was when she had different experiences.

According to the Burkina Faso traditions when someone in your life dies they hand you their spirit and life so that you can accomplish more.  They had you, essentially, a golden ticket.  Suicides are viewed as a very powerful way to grant someone else your spirit (my understanding is) because the person escaped great torment and brought that with them.  They learned a lot in the process and once they are on the other side of death they can help you better.

My maternal grandmother committed suicide when my mother was pregnant with me.  My paternal grandmother (whom I am named after) died a year or two before my mother had me.  My paternal grandfather died days before my brother Tommy was born.  If Orlando gave Tommy his spirit, maybe that is part of why Tommy was so fucked up.  My maternal grandfather died right before I saw my father for the last time at Jimmy’s wedding.  Right before I told my mother that she had to take my father back to court in order to get him to stop touching me.

When I was pregnant with Shanna I lost both my adopted step-mom and my beloved therapist to heroin overdoses.  Two of the women who were among my strongest bulwarks against the dark.  They both suffered terribly from their internal wounds.  They were not strong enough to fight back their demons.

Unsurprisingly I arrived at a place of deep anger.  I raged and screamed and started beating my fists on the floor.  The wonderful facilitator had someone put a thick cushion in front of me.  I would have cheerfully broken my hands to pieces and enjoyed the pain manifestation.  Later in the day I told her, “I have a habit of beating my hands and head against concrete floors.  I really appreciate that you put a pillow in front of me.”

Apparently the concept of “personal problems” simply doesn’t exist there.  All problems are problems of the community because if the community was functioning appropriately the problems wouldn’t exist.  That made me ache with loneliness for someone who would give a shit about me enough to want to actually help me with my problems.  Not just one person at a time.  I wish all of Lakeside School would gather to hold me in their arms and let me sob out my grief.  I wish they had stepped in and helped me instead of saying that people like me don’t exist.

It was interesting to think through the level of responsibility I bear for my niece and nephew being sexually assaulted.  My brother thinks it is enough for our generation to shut up and not talk about the incest.  He thinks that will solve everything.  Thus our grief has already passed on to the next generation.  We did not take responsibility for speaking the truth about our family.  Silence is consent.  If my understanding of the situation is correct I was twenty-one when my sister assaulted her children and taught them how to give one another oral sex.  I was living with Tom.  I had almost no contact with my family because I was not ready to have boundaries with them.  I never stepped in on behalf of the kids.  I didn’t tell my story to a CPS agent and get a case opened on my sister early enough.  There were already many HUGE issues at the time that would have been enough to open a case.  Maybe if Denise was being watched more closely it never would have happened.

I don’t know.  I will never know.

This is where the twelve step programs tell me to trust God.  Well fuck God.  No.  I need to let go of responsibility for my family.  I can’t save them.  I don’t have enough of me to give to fill their malicious black hole of need and pain.  They have to find a way out of that on their own.  If they come find me I don’t know what I will do.  I know one thing I will avoid doing: letting them develop a relationship with my kids.  My family doesn’t get to know my kids until my kids are adults.  If they want to go meet my family then I will drive them over.  I probably won’t get out of the car… but I’ll drive.

I grieved for my mother.  I thought about the smell of her and the comfort of her body against mine as we slept together.  I thought about how very much I love my mother.  I idealize my mother.  It always felt like she was so talented and wonderful and beautiful.  I will never compare favorably to my mother.  Only at the same time I think she was a weak monster.  I think she was shaped by ignorance and pain.  You don’t know what you don’t know, right?  I don’t think I can remain angry with my mother much longer.  I need to treat her as already dead.  I need to move forward in my heart to a place where I no longer desire vengeance.  She is my mother.  She carried me in her body.  She nursed me.  When I think of what my daughters mean to me I know that my mother is already in enough pain.  She has lost three of her children, two to desertion.  I’m sure she has already had enough pain this lifetime.

I feel so very sad for my mother.  She was abused and abandoned over and over.  Her father was a nightmare and he loathed her for the divorce.  Vernon treated my mother like a cockroach because she had committed the sin of leaving her husband.  Who cares what he does to the kids, right?  My mother was feisty and mouthy; her Mennonite family thought she should be taken down a few pegs!  See how it starts?  My mother used to come home from school as a child and have to clean up from her mother attempting suicide.  Again.  My grandparents fostered and my mother was never allowed to have any special toys because it “just wouldn’t be fair” to the transient kids.  My mother was never given a Christmas stocking until I was sixteen and I did it.

And I abandoned her too.  Even though I was supposed to be her comfort.  Even though I was the good and affectionate child.  I was so fucking devoted to my mother.  I can’t allow her to teach my children that they are small and bad and dirty and they deserve to be tortured.  I just can’t.  I was given a sacred trust by the God I don’t believe in to guard these people.  My only job is to raise them in safety and love. I’m not about to fuck up my job.  Not even for someone I have loved more than life.

I think the oddest part of today was the random older woman who came to join us.  She likes to just sit in on these rituals.  She was probably in her seventies with broken, missing, and severely discolored teeth.  Her hair was a mixture of grey and white and tied into a braid that went down past her waist.  She had these interestingly bright blue eyes.  She mostly looked like she was in a stupor, honestly.  But if you sat down next to her and looked at her with respect she came alive.

I don’t want to give her name because that seems like a violation.  We talked about anger.  She looked at me and she said, “Oh you are vibrating with anger.”  It was less obvious than usual, in my opinion, so it was both startling and not.  I felt calm and like I was in a decent mood.  Given how much time I do spend vibrating with anger I just said, “Yes.”  I can’t possibly remember the exact wording, today has been intense and full of new impressions, but she looked at me hard and didn’t ask any questions.  She volunteered these…I don’t want to say fortune cookie comments.  It’s kind of like reading the Horoscope.  Any of them can fit, right?  Only it wasn’t really that.  It felt more like she was getting something from me.  God I feel stupid talking about this woo woo shit.  She asked me if I was selected for suffering every time.  It’s not unreasonable for me to feel like that.  It’s not true any more, but it was.  She told me very clearly that I escaped because of my anger but now I have to be careful.  She said that there are two emotional experiences that come up completely unprompted: anger and laughter.  She said that I have gotten what I needed from the anger and now I need to laugh.

I cried.  I cried and screamed and ranted about how much I fucking hate them and I am glad they are dead.  I told him that if he wasn’t dead I would kill him myself.  I beat the floor until my arm muscles spasmed too hard for me to lift them.  I beat my head against the floor until I could no longer lift it from the pillow.  I lay there and cried and cried and cried for hours lying on my side because I could no longer hold my neck up because I was in so much pain.  People took turns sitting with me to share my grief.  Mostly I could not allow them to touch me.  There were a few specific women who felt safe.  Two.  I let them hug me.

I feel humiliated admitting that in this room full of people having this emotionally bonding experience I could let two of them (three including the instructor) touch me.  I feel like this distance that I keep is part of my problem.  I feel so deeply unable to allow people to love me.  I don’t know how.  That is not a skill I possess.

I understood more about my mother today.  I understand her scars and wounds in ways I didn’t before.  I love my mother so much.  I understand her frustrations and anger and thinly veiled violence.  I understand why she was so frantic when I misbehaved where anyone could see.  She told me constantly that people would judge her by my behavior so I had to not fuck up.  I understand now why she reacted the way she did to my unpredictability.  Now I have children.  Now I can think about her father and what kind of man he was.  Now I can think about Aunt Vonnie’s dark references to terrible beatings.

Sobonfu’s tradition believes that diabetes exists in the body because of an inability to truly accept love.  Vernon, my mom’s father, is the oldest example of that in my family I know.  And I know he treated his daughters like shit.  He never wanted their love; he wanted their silence and obedience.  Sound familiar? I was actually rarely hit as a child and my mother took flack from fucking everyone over that.  The whole family was ready to line up and beat me with sticks.  I have never been popular.  My mother defended me.  My mother defended me in so many ways.  She saw me as being like her.  We were both the youngest girl in families of four.  We were both raised very separately from our siblings.  We both felt like the black sheep.

This life business is complicated.  I’m starting to understand how compassion is part of this story for me.  I can have compassion for my mother and her suffering and still refrain from contact because my children deserve a childhood safe from people who are likely to tell them things they shouldn’t be told.  My mother likes to blame people for things that aren’t their fault.  My children will not learn shaming from their family.  They’ll have to figure that out somewhere else.

Part of my ancestral grief is our constant desire to have shit roll down hill.  We always pass the blame for our emotions.  I wouldn’t feel this way if you hadn’t made me.  This is why I cannot be angry with Calli for throwing my wallet out of the wagon.  She is a baby.  She is not responsible.  I should have bloody well put my wallet somewhere secure.  When Shanna is doing stuff that drives me nuts I have to ask her why she is doing something before I react.  9/10 times she has a reason that is totally fucking logical from her world view.  Her world view and mine have only occasional overlaps, mostly things like “ice cream is good” though we strongly disagree on how often we should eat it.

I don’t want to teach my children that they are to blame for my rage.  They aren’t.  I have a whole god damn book about why I feel so much rage.  I have no ability in any way to blame my emotional reactions on them.  That’s kind of annoying, actually.  In my family I was the scapegoat.  I wonder who is getting it now?  Someone is at the bottom, I promise you.

And I spent a long time today thinking about everything I know about my ancestors.  I can see why my family culminated in the horror that was my life.  I can have compassion for all of our respective victim-hoods.  I would kind of like to stop being a victim and they don’t even know enough to understand that it is an option.  That’s quite sad.  Today I thought hard about the fact that my sister wouldn’t do the things she does if she was in less pain.  She was harshly rejected by two fathers.  Her birth father rejected her before birth and then again in her thirties.  He didn’t want to know her despite the fact that she did 100% of the effort to have a relationship.  I pity her.

If the book pays off the editor I’m going to use that personal money to go to another grief ritual.  I have many more layers.  But I feel like I can perceive the beginnings of a path.  I think I am going to find somewhere to put an altar in my house.

It’s time to wash this grief off and go to bed.  I need to scrub my entire body with salt first.

family roles

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When I was in middle school we moved up to Redwood Estates.  My aunt and uncle bought a new house and left some of the family behind at the old house and took some of the family with them to the new house.  Eventually all but their middle child ended up living in the new house while the old house was rented out.  When I say “all” I mean their two other children.  And my male cousin had a girlfriend who had three kids.  My girl cousin had a kid.  My sister and her two kids.  My mother and me.  That’s what I mean by “all”.  It was a five bedroom house.

We lost our driveway in an El Niño storm.  I have a lot of respect for nature.  We were stuck in the house for two weeks without running water, electricity, or phone.  We could hike up the mountain to get to roads so we did get help and what have you.  Eventually they brought in this awesome massive bridge and drove the cars over the pool onto the neighbors driveway.  Then we parked down in this little cul-de-sac and had to walk up a hellacious stair case to get to the house.  The stairs were unevenly spaced, very awkward to walk on, and really shitty to fall down.  They were also slick all year long from the water on the moss.

In losing our driveway we mostly lost the ability to get heat in the house.  Propane couldn’t be delivered.  They didn’t have the money to fix the driveway for years.  We just dealt with the stairs.  When we wanted to move someone in or out (that happened all the time) we would just open the gate to the neighbors driveway and hope she wasn’t home.  She hated us and if we used her driveway much she made our life hell.

One of my strongest memories during my childhood is coming downstairs from my bedroom to see Aunt Vonnie slowly walking into the kitchen with her arms full of grocery bags.  I asked her if there was anything left at the bottom.  She said yes but told me she needed to rest for a minute before going to get it.  Aunt Vonnie is older than my mom by a good ten years.  My mom was thirty two when I was born so Auntie is ~forty two years older than me.  I must have ben thirteen or so.  Let’s call her sixty.  So my sixty year old aunt was trudging up these treacherous stairs with her haul from Costco while most of the family sat in the living room watching tv.  There were children ranging in age from three to thirteen, most of them on the older end.  And several adults.  All of whom have health issues, sure… but so does Auntie.  And she’s the oldest one present.

I went around the room slapping everyone, regardless of age, and told them to get off their fucking asses and get down to the car right now.  If you want to fucking eat, you get that food into the house.  Auntie isn’t your fucking servant.  Go.  Now.  They listened, grumbling all the while.  I pushed and pulled them down the hill then loaded them up and sent them back up the hill.  I carried the heaviest load even though I wasn’t the oldest or strongest there because he was a lazy piece of shit.  As usual.  I think he grabbed the roll of toilet paper.  When we got to the top Aunt Vonnie thanked me.  I knew that I was the only one who was going to lighten her load.

It always appalled me the way she was treated like a dog.  She worked from the time she woke up till she finally fell into bed far too late at night.  She cooked and cleaned and did all the shopping and worked and raised many many children.  When my sister makes comments about how she will be the matriarch after Auntie dies she doesn’t understand what that means.  She has no idea how much effort it is.  Aunt Vonnie is the matriarch because she is the only (semi-)effective person there.  She is the one who maintains a roof for everyone.  She is the one who ensures there is food.  She hosts because she does all the work and has a stable home.

The last Christmas I invited my family to my home my sister sat here and informed me how it was going to be hard on mom to be passed over as matriarch because it was clearly going to be my sister because she was the one who does all the work.  I blinked.  I looked at her.  I sat there thinking about how many of the holiday meals I have hosted over the years.  My sister hasn’t done it once.  I thought about how much money they have all asked me for.  I thought about how often I have been asked to save their asses.

I don’t want to be Aunt Vonnie.  I am not going to walk around for the rest of my life muttering about how there is no point in saying anything because nothing ever changes I just have to do all the work for everyone.  I have too many anger issues to take that role.  It is not a fit for me.  I will break too much of my house.

I was told over and over how much everyone was sacrificing “for me”.  It was my fault that they had to spend money on me so that I could live.  I owed them for their sacrifice.  Not right away, of course. But they always knew that I had the annuity money coming.  Comments were made.  Selfishness is one of the biggest sins you can be accused of in my family.  It’s kind of funny.  It was never being selfish when it came to discussions about Aunt Vonnie’s share of the work load.

Part of the road to Noah

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This fine morning a friend asked me about a link on Facebook about Mansplaining.  It lead to an interesting conversation about whether men or women (sexist language abounds.  I’m going to do an aside to say that there is a really odd mixture of statistics on whether rape is a female problem or a problem that is closer to equal than anyone can handle admitting.  I am defaulting to standard sexist language because that is my experience base.  I do not mean to say that my experiences are universal–they are not.  Carry on.) bear responsibility for rape.

I’m going to call myself out for being an asshole, because I was, but I was a persuasive asshole.  I said, more or less, “Oh reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally?  How much responsibility do I bear for being raped?”  I then proceeded to go through a list of the times I have been arguably raped as an adult when I should be responsible for my ability to pick “safe” people.  I decided it was time to tell the story of Dan Morgan.  I haven’t before.  Not really.

On December 18th, 2005 I posted this in my livejournal:
I am about to climb out of my head with wanting sex. But I still don’t want casual sex. I feel kind of lame. It has been just over three weeks and I am already going batty? Damn the time is going to pass slow… This is longer than I have gone without sex in… oh god… uhhhhh… two years. For the record: I have really enjoyed how much sex I have had in the last two years. *sigh* Thank you to all the lovely people who have made the last two years so much fun. 🙂 I was asked on Friday if going back to casual sex would be better than waiting for more meaningful sex. I told the person that I am coming out of a relationship where I have had the best sex of my life and going back to more mediocre sex would be a serious let down and I am not quite ready to do that yet. I think a lot/most of what made that sex so awesome was I was more present for it than I usually am. I asked Puppy for what I wanted in ways that I have never been comfortable asking before. Other than the actual technical amount of time spent having sex I got exactly what I wanted pretty much when I wanted. There was also a variety that blew my mind. I kind of feel like I rediscovered vanilla sex. And it can be GOOD. 

I miss every part of sex. I miss having his body over mine. I miss the scary intensity of having him slide into my ass. I miss feeling a cock in my throat. I miss feeling his tongue on my clit. I really miss having a cock in my pussy. The discerning reader will notice the change in possessive pronouns in the previous statements. There are some sex acts that were very specific to him that I miss him for. There are some that I am just missing in general right now. He is the only sex partner I have ever received regular anal or oral from. 

I didn’t mention this part to the person who asked, but I actually don’t really want to go back to casual sex because I don’t want to go back to the fanaticism I have when I am being a slut. I don’t particularly like getting STD tested every three months. I don’t particularly like condoms. I really really really like unprotected sex–which is a scary and dangerous thing. I can’t have it casually because I am not willing to risk my life. I am still on the pill. The first time he tried to break up with me I asked him if I could maintain booty call rights. I think I have it in the back of my mind that waiting a couple of months until I am less emotionally attached is a good thing, but eventually having him as a booty call would be a good thing. Although this is just mental masturbation. I really think that in order to not hurt myself emotionally it would have to be 4-6 months before I would be able to have sex with him and not cry through the entire event. And yeah. I am well aware that I technically can wait that long to have sex but I really don’t have to and I won’t go back to unprotected sex with him if I sleep with someone else. Ethics are annoying.

Right now, all I know is that I have a stronger desire right now for being beaten, for being held down and fucked unmercilessly than I have had in a very long time. I want to be slapped and taunted with how very horny I am right now. I want to have someone revel in my lustiness and appreciate the fact that I can wear someone out right now. I want to have someone fuck me until I beg them to stop because I am so sore. I want to be restrained and hurt and threatened. I want… sex.

The person I had been talking to on Friday was Dan Morgan.  I don’t know how we started talking.  I’m sure we met through Dickens Fair.  No!  Tribe?  Was it Tribe?  I don’t remember for sure.  That sounds right, though.  We were having these really awesome long conversations over IM about fun kinky sex stuff we were interested in doing.  I was adamant about casual sex meaning condoms.  He didn’t like that bit.  He told me quite a bit about how condoms were annoying.  My response: tough.  No cover, no entry.

Our first date was on Christmas Day in Disneyland.  I uhhh kind of bought his ticket in.  He was really broke and said he couldn’t afford the trip if he had to pay for theme park tickets, though he had friends he could go crash with who would go with him to the park if I got him in.  I didn’t have a problem with this.

We had a really fun date.  Involving upsetting his friends when Dan fingered me in the Tiki Room.  We were shit-faced drunk from the bar in downtown Disney.  Disneyland as an adult is very different. Other people go and treat it very differently than I do.  Anyway.

He went off with his friends and I went off with mine.  On December 27th I posted:
Disneyland is still cool.
First dates… are interesting.
Still not up for sex even though I am crawling the walls.
I went to the gym and I am proud of myself.
I haven’t made one itty bitty movement towards cleaning my apartment.
I have food now.
Tomorrow I have three netflix movies to send back.
My cat is hella clingy.
My family sucks even more than usual.
I am really drunk.
I told Puppy that he is an elitist piece of shit tonight.
I am tired of planes.
I am really tired and uninterested in sleeping for some strange reason… I think I am going to lose that battle in the next 10 minutes though.
I missed country music.
Zzzzzzzzz
sleep. 
I love my friends.

And then on December 29th I posted:
Tiki Bar TV

London Fogcutter, episode 8. That is the reason for my hangover.

I didn’t bother to mention that the real reason for my hangover was because Dan came over.  We had a pleasant afternoon together.  We dealt with a motorcycle gear acquisition for him.  There was a good store near me.  We tried to get to know one another.  By evening he said we should start watching the show.  He started making drinks.  He made more and more.  Dan is a really serious alcoholic.  I don’t drink much and never have.  Alcohol makes my stomach hurt.  He kept topping up my glass.  “Oh come on.  You don’t want to get behind now, do you?”  He was very antagonistic towards me trying to get me to drink more.

I wanted him to like me.  I will freely say that.  I thought he was shiny.  I’m sure there was an element of star-fucking in it.  He seemed well-liked.  Maybe if I stood next to him I would feel like not-poison for a while.

I woke up at about 3am in my bed confused.  I couldn’t remember anything past Tiki Bar TV.  And I don’t know that I remember more than two episodes of it.  I reached down between my legs and felt a lot of wet.  I rolled out of bed (because I had no other way of getting to the floor) and crawled into the bathroom.  There I proceeded to vomit until I thought I would die.  It was awesome.  This was when I was living in San Jose by myself for the only time in my life.

Puppy dumped me on Thanksgiving day.  Noah asked me to marry him in March.  Dan was right in the middle.  Of-fucking-course I said yes to Noah.

Anyway.  When I stopped puking I looked for my phone.  I sent Dan a text message asking where he was, when he left, and uhm, did we have sex?  He said he was at home.  He had left at 2.  Yes, we had sex.  I sent back another message saying: …unprotected sex?  He said, “Well you are on the pill so it doesn’t matter, right?”

I said basically nothing about this event to anyone who knew me.  It wasn’t exactly rape, right?  Only legally it was.  Regardless of whether I intended to have sex or not, once I was passed out drunk it wasn’t ok.  I had text evidence that I wasn’t interested in unprotected sex.  And I bloody well thought about the fact that I could go in for a rape kit and it would be bloody obvious that we had unprotected sex.

I was afraid of people saying that I was having second thoughts.  I was afraid of people saying that I was stupid or that I deserved it.  I believe that unprotected sex is a disease vector.  At that point in my life I was still really focused on the fact that I wanted to have children.  I didn’t risk any more disease than I had to.  I already have herpes and I’ve already had an hpv outbreak.  That damage was done long before.  I did the best I could with the information that I had.

Do you know why I was so afraid of going to the police?  Well.  That’s another story.  I can’t give you a name because I honestly don’t remember it.  I don’t really want to.  I wouldn’t remember Dan’s if he wasn’t a trusted member of my extended community I thought was safe.

The summer I was 18 I was drunk with the sexual power of being a woman.  Finally, for the first time in my life what I was doing and mine to decide about.  I finally had the legal right to consent.  It did actually matter to me.  It has always bothered me that my early partners could have gone to jail for what we did.  It feels like an unfair balance of responsibility.  Anyway.

So when I was 18 I was on match.com.  Don’t judge.  I was hanging out in the chat rooms a lot.  I met up with several people.  The first was a guy who was in the Coast Guard.  He lived in Alameda.  Anna was housesitting for a family way the heck up Summit Road.  The other side, not the same side as Redwood Estates.  Way up in the fancy-pants part of the mountains.  The house was beautiful.  I can’t remember if there were three or four stories.  Elaborate wine cellar (like a huge vault that was about 1/3 the size of the bottom floor of the house), sauna, steam room, exercise room, pool, hot tub… everything.  The family was having a lot of work done on the house.  They gave Anna permission to have me stay up there with her.

I know they regretted that.  It was all my fault.  Anna had worked for them successfully for years at that point.  I ruined a very profitable relationship for her and I still feel bad about that.  That is part of what I mean when I say I am poison.  Anna bore a lot of the brunt of the backlash for this.  But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

We invited a couple of my theater friends and this random guy from match.com up to the house for a party.  It wasn’t that wild because my theater friends were young and sweet and inexperienced.  I think back on them with this really nostalgic color.  They were really awesome and I didn’t know how to stay one of them.

Of course there was drinking.  Unless I snuck off behind Anna’s back she said I had three shots of tequila and then I begged off because my stomach hurt.  Everyone else kept drinking.  I don’t remember much after the second shot.  I woke up in the morning feeling fierce and disgusting.  I couldn’t remember any sex and I was kind of sad.  I was confused though because I couldn’t remember much of anything, really.  But I had to hurry up and get moving.  I was working at Pride in San Francisco.  I was working a booth for the Same Sex Marriage organization.  It was awesome.  I met people and did things I’m really glad I did.  In between doing all of them I had to run to Port-A-Potties to vomit.  I did that all day long.  When I went back up to the house in the mountains I took another shower and curled up on the bed.  I happened to lean over and look in the trash can.  There were three used condoms.

Funny.  I didn’t remember having sex.  I asked Anna what happened.  She told me about the party and said that eventually I stumbled back up to the room with the help of this guy.  I asked her how I looked and she said, “You looked really out of it.”  I nodded.  I told her that I think that what happened technically qualifies as rape.  I called the Sheriff.  She was dubious.  She was right.

The particular officer who showed up is one I have met before.  When I was 11 Al Smith, my next door neighbor at the time, asked me if I would have sex with him.  Our other neighbor overheard the whole exchange and reported it.  That’s why the officer came to my house when I was 11.  When I was 11 he told my family I was crazy and that I needed help.  He wouldn’t prosecute Al.

When I was 18 he told me, “What did you expect when you bring a boy up to a house to drink?”  He took the (outrageously expensive) sheets as “evidence” and then told me he was not going to fuck up the life of some nice Coast Guard boy for a girl like me who gets cold feet after the fact.

The fall out was really bad.  The family had to be told why we disappeared their sheets.  We would have been better off lying.  Given the response of the sheriff it looked really bad and hysterical.  It was even worse because I had gone skinny dipping in the pool and flirted with the guy painting the house. I was obviously horrible.  The family was really angry with Anna for bringing someone like me into their house.  They told her if she wanted to know people like me they didn’t want to know her.

Years later I was behind their car on the freeway.  The license plate has their last name on it.  I felt such a sickening wave of shame.

Why didn’t I call the police after Dan fucked me without a condom?  Uhm…. good pattern recognition skills?  Every time someone tells me that women bear some of the responsibility for being raped I want to scream.  I HAVEN’T EVEN BEEN ALLOWED TO GIVE CONSENT WHEN I WANTED TO SO SHUT THE FUCK UP.  Rape is an abuse of power.  Rape is putting a body part into someone else when they have not consented.  That is not something that is about mutual responsibility.

That asshole when I was 18 raped me.  I could not consent by the time he had sex with me, but at least he used condoms.  When I was 24 I was raped because having unprotected sex with me after I had it in writing many times that I don’t do that is illegal.  And I was too chicken shit to say anything because I am well aware that no one in power gives a shit what happens to white trash whores like me.

And then Noah showed up.  I would have been manifestly stupid and crazy to continue the life path I was on without him.

hair cutting

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No one really knows what the boundaries are for another person.  You have to speak for yourself, only, always.  I decided to stop hunting and I cut all my hair off.  In the bathroom with nail scissors.  And now I’m going to feel like a fucking schmuck for years.  Something broke.  I think if I believed I could get away with wearing a burqa I would.  I feel like a melodramatic, stupid, immature moron.  Not to put too fine a point on it.

Ok, so what really happened is I was in the process of trying to leave the house one day and I couldn’t comb through the snarls.  I lost my temper and badly cut the knot out.  I have been compulsively going into the bathroom to fix it ever since.  It’s rather short.  My hair is not ok with bleach.  I have a fairly ridiculous amount of shame around the fact that this is not the first time I have stopped hunting and shaved my head.  I should tell that story.  I don’t know if it is in the book or not.

I was seventeen and at West Valley.  I was hanging out with Praveena.  It was towards the end of our time hanging out together.  I was on the tail end of one of my whoring-around-phases and feeling really bad about myself.  I was getting to the point where I noticed that everyone who fucked me ditched me really soon after.  I was at Praveena’s house and we were having a conversation about the fact that it bothered me that people no longer wanted to be my friend after we had sex.  She thoughtfully looked at me and said, “Then why don’t you find out if they want to be your friend before you have sex with them?”

I started shaking.  You don’t understand.  People don’t spend time with me very often.  Sex was how I got people to look at me.  I moved around so often that I knew that I had to get attention quickly or I wouldn’t get it at all.  I know what I’m supposed to act like.  I know my “role”.  I couldn’t verbalize any of that at the time.  I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to be near me.  I just sat there shaking.  I had been cutting my hair at home compulsively for a while.  It was probably three or four inches long.  I asked her for shaving supplies.  She was kind of confused as to why I wanted to shave my legs right then but she got them.

I went out in the back yard and shaved my head.  She watched in wide mouthed horror.  She had hair almost to her waist.  She was a gorgeous Persian girl with super thick luscious hair.  She sputtered and gasped and tried to talk me out of it.  I remember the look of squick on her face.  I laughed.

My mother didn’t laugh.  To put this in larger context, this happened in October of 1998.  My father had killed himself a couple of weeks earlier.  Tommy had killed himself in June.  My mom said a lot of very rude and nasty things to me about my looks.  She pointed out that my head was exceedingly lumpy.  She pointed out that given how fat I was, my head looked especially small and stupid.  I need that big bushy hair to balance out my fat ass.

I was invited to go to a ‘formal’ dinner related to the haunted house event I volunteered at.  My hair was only a few millimeters long at that point.  I covered my head in glitter and wore a tight black velvet dress.  My mom didn’t say anything, but she shook her head and grimaced.

At the time I felt awkward and stupid and barely spoke to anyone.  The reality is that people were perfectly nice and civil to me.  The people who knew me at all were friendly and strangers went out of their way to be nice.  I never went back to that organization.  My mother extensively talked about how stupid I looked and how she bets they would be making fun of me behind my back.

I’m not really cutting my hair because I think it makes me look ugly.  When I feel ugly I feel compelled to cut my hair.  I really do have beautiful hair.  My hair is lovely enough that someone who feels and acts the way I do should not have that much camouflage to look “normal”.

I can’t possibly explain my mothers furious disgust at people who dye their hair “funny colors”.  Oh my god.  Anyone who would do that is disgusting.  They are lesser, dirty people.  They are not normal.  Above all we must be normal, right?  I don’t even know what that means.

I really and truly did dye my hair because I thought it was fun.  I have enjoyed catching glimpses of myself in reflections and seeing the shock of color.  It makes me smile.  Unfortunately my hair is quite fine and the bleach destroys it and it gets shorter and shorter and… yeah.  It’s time to deal with letting it grow out again.

And that represents so much internal conflict of self-expression and self-identity.  It’s ridiculous that it matters so much.  As I listen to Lady Gaga sing about her own hair experience I feel trite and ridiculous and like I am such a product of my generation.  Of course I dye my hair odd colors and cut it myself in ridiculous ways.  I’m Emo, right?  I guess I never got over high school.

This is part of what I mean when I say I don’t fit.  I don’t really know the rules.  Do you want to know the main reason I’m cutting my hair myself?  Because it really doesn’t matter if I pay someone to do this.  Pretty soon I’m going to just buzz it because it’s time to start fresh.  There really isn’t a point in paying someone to do that.  I’ve been looking extensively at our budgeting.  I’m going to continue paying for Noah’s haircuts because I like them.  Enh, I’m just done paying for them for a few years.  It makes me twitch to pay that much money on hair care.  Curly hair is very forgiving and it’s not like I’m trying to impress anyone.  That feels bad to say.

I have fun cutting my hair.  I like trying to figure out the shape of my head.  I get compliments from random people when I am out so I think I do a reasonable job.  I’m not ugly.  I don’t really think that having short hair makes me ugly.  I don’t think that other people with short hair are ugly.  But when I am feeling ugly I compulsively cut my hair.  I’m trying to change what I see in the mirror.  I want to have more control over what I see.  I don’t want to go pay someone else who will try to make me look like some mainstream idea of beauty.  Whatever it is that society values and requires of women I am not it.  Let’s get the advertising straight.

There are fifty sides to every story.  I like cutting my hair.  I think it is fun.  I think it is weird.  I think it is a slightly self-harming behavior but fairly harmless so it’s ok.  I think it is an obsessive compulsive tick when I am overwhelmed with my sexuality.  I think that other people will judge me badly for being the kind of person who will do this.  I don’t know why I care.  Thank goodness we are through picture season.

I need to let the roots get a bit longer before I decide how short to get.  Until then I get to cut off bits and pieces every time the urge strikes.  I think it is kind of funny that I do this during cold weather.  I guess I’ll just have to wear my Cheshire Cat hat all the time for a few months.  That’s subtle.

I told Noah some truth last night.  I wonder how that will work out.

Sacred cows

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I’m trying to decide what mood I want to be in for today’s writing sprint.  My first date yesterday was an only date.  That’s ok.  I’m glad I had the “I want to be chased” thought yesterday.  By the time I got to the date I was real clear that I was uninterested in being the one to do 100% of the physical aggression.  I’m happy to do 50%.  But I’m not running the fuck.  You don’t want me bad enough.  No more pity fucks.

I don’t need to go have pity fucks with strangers.  I had sex with Noah twice.  It was hot.

I was thinking about the fact that a lot of folks have been discussing “appropriate topics” lately.  Over here at Soggy in Milk we are the all-inappropriate-all-the-time channel so I’m going to wax poetic for a few minutes.  Bear with me.  So imagine you had this nice normal life.  You have great parents and a couple of siblings you adore.  As you go through your life you get to spread daisies and sunshine and shit when you mention your euphoric family.  Everyone compliments you and tells you how wonderful you all sound.  Then I want you to stop for thirty seconds and think of what you have read from me here.  Man I really want you to do this again after you read the book, if you want to.

Now.  How the fuck do you think I feel when people talk about their families?  What exactly should I say if in response to questions about my family?  Should I lie?  Evade?  Be as curt as possible so as to minimize the damage I am invariably going to do?  Be honest and watch as people all but run as fast as they can to get away from me?

Seriously.  Where is my good fucking option.  Because you assholes seem to think that the topic of “childhood” and “families” is perfectly appropriate in public.  Oh, people will tell me, “Well you can talk about Noah and the girls!”  How generous of you.  I’m so grateful that I have a pat answer now that will satisfy your need for idle chit chat about things you are uninterested in.  Let. me. make. you. more. comfortable.  I live to serve.

I am angry about the so-called polite conversational topics because they exist to silence people like me.  They exist to make people like me invisible.  And powerless.  They exist to make it impossible for most people to successfully prosecute their attackers because it’s not ok to say what has happened to you.  Ever.  People who say, “Well it’s ok to say it to the police” have obviously never pressed charges for sexual assault.  I have.  Do you know how the police treat you?  They say that you have mental problems and you should be in therapy.  Despite the fact that the next door neighbor heard the whole thing and reported it to the police.  I was still dismissed as crazy.

Fuck appropriate conversation topics.  Do you know what is an appropriate conversational topic?  Police brutality.  Incest.  Rape.  Poverty.  These are things that can and must be talked about as often as necessary.  In any circumstance.  Ok, not in any circumstance.  But in any circumstance where there are only adults present.  I don’t think every five year old needs to hear about incest.  But every child should grow up hearing frank conversations about police brutality and poverty.  They should know that these things exist.  This should be part of their lives too.  Because it is part of being aware of the world around you.

If someone brings up a topic you don’t like you can try to change the conversation and make it all about you, or you can engage in a dialogue.  If you are feeling massively uncomfortable, say that.  Look at why.  If your upset is about your irrational beliefs being challenged… fucking go with it.  Get over yourself.  Seriously.

Things don’t change until people are upset enough to make them change.  The longer you brush uncomfortable conversations under the rug only to be had at rare, carefully pre-selected, never risky times you are growing at a snails pace.  That’s not something that fuels real personal growth, I’m sorry.  I’m that kind of control freak.  I can do that.  I love doing that.  It means I don’t do any personal growth.  It means I hide in my little freak ghetto and get into a rut.

I’m better than that.  I need to go have the uncomfortable conversations.  I need to be honest.  I need to exist in the world.  I need to demand the right to take up just as much space as everyone else.  I’m not going to evade or give a half-truth when someone asks about my family.  I will answer questions honestly.  I will act like I have nothing to be ashamed of.  “Oh, what’s your family like?”  “Incestuous rapists.”  And I will take the blinking eyes I get.  I will take the look of shock and horror.  And I will try not to flinch.  And I will try not to cry.  And I will try not to run away.  And I will try to answer the following questions graciously without my voice cracking.

I’m not doing something bad by telling my story.  I’m just existing.  Yes, it’s a harsh story.  Sometimes life is harsh.  Sometimes people have harsh lives.  It’s far more common when you live in poverty.  That is a big part of the story.  Why did I move so often?  Because my mother was running away from my dad and from one abusive situation to another.  Because we lived on charity.  Because we had no choice.  Because we were evicted repeatedly for non-payment of rent.

I’m tired of trying to make up a story that will make other people feel comfortable around me.  I have spent my entire life trying to figure out how to lie well enough to be able to talk about myself.  I’m really tired of it.  I’m really tired of trying to invent a me that is good enough to be in public.  If I carefully censor myself enough, maybe I will be a good enough person to deserve to be part of public discourse.  This feels really shitty you know.

This wouldn’t be such a big part of my story if other people didn’t require that I tell elaborate lies in order to appear “normal”.  It’s not lying!  It’s just… not mentioning things.  Uhm.  If you don’t know that my family is full of incestuous rapists then you don’t know anything about them and I shouldn’t bother talking.  Because it affected everything.  It makes a big difference when I talk about my mother hating that I swore if I mention that I was raped about twenty minutes before she beat me for cussing.  It gives a whole new perspective.  That was my life.  I was raped and then I came home to more poison.  Multiple times.  It’s kind of weird that I would come home from being raped and be mean and nasty and full of rage, right?  But that kind of behavior was not to be tolerated and I was to be brought down a few pegs.

It’s time to go start writing on the book for today.  For better or for worse I found my tone.  It’s time to go put a narrative on this bastard.

One of the problems with polyamory

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I don’t know if other people sit around in their off-time listening to songs and trying to place them onto various relationships.  Particularly, today I am listening to Adele’s Someone Like You.  The way she talks about the song in this video is striking.  It has dramatically altered my hearing of the song.

I miss Steve and Tom.  I think I would be able to be the kind of person Steve could be friends now.  I think I have changed my reactions to some of our patterns.  I didn’t like how I treated Steve, but I liked Steve.  I would have broken him if I had stayed with him.  Instead I ran away.  I didn’t just break off dating him.  I stopped going any place he might be.  I avoided his friends like the plague.  Anyone who knew us both lost me after the break up.

I walked away from my life.  I broke all ties.  I changed my major in college.  I dropped out of college.  I broke up with Steve just a few months before our wedding and then I evaporated like a drop of water.  But there were a lot of reasons I wanted to marry him, you know?  He was a really amazing person.  I miss him.  I miss the things he brought into my life.  I don’t want to have sex with him, that part didn’t work well for me.  But I miss him being my close friend.  I dated him before I had ever told anyone the full story of my abuse.  Before I was out publicly as a rape survivor.  I could still name every single person I had ever had sexual contact with.  I had two lists.  One of girls, which was very long.  I didn’t tell people about that list.  And the boys, which was long but not frightening because I don’t count my rapists.  Oh wait, there was a third list in my head–the rapists.  I could still count my positive boy-sex experiences on my fingers with Steve.  Steve was the first boy who ever gave me an actual orgasm. I faked it before that.  Uhm, sorry people from high school.

I miss Steve a lot.  He was passionate about things the way Noah is.  I love basking in that kind of joy in the simple act of attaining knowledge.  Steve liked to learn.  He was inspiring to be around.  He isn’t book smart, and it was by choice.  He came from a highly educated family.  He was a self-didact though.  He knew how to do an amazing array of things.  And if he didn’t know how to do something he would figure out how to learn.  Nothing daunted him.  I miss that.  I didn’t know how to deal with it when I was 18.  I didn’t know how to explain to him that things were harder for me than him because I didn’t have this loving background telling me I could accomplish things, I had to move slower than him sometimes.

Enh, I don’t remember the particulars well enough to analyze it.  Whatever.  That’s not the point.  I would really like to know what kind of man he has become.  I’m pretty sure I was right back then when I knew that I wouldn’t enjoy living with him long-term.  But I think I could be his friend now.  I think I would know how to listen to his interests without bashing him over the head with my issues.

I ran from Steve to Tom.  In a straight line.  Jumping on a few nice people along the way.  I was 18 and living with a lonely old lady who wanted company and I wanted to be surfing the internet looking for sex.  As soon as I became involved with him I started using his house as a base.  I was there a lot when he was at work because I didn’t have anywhere else to be.  His internet was paid for, he didn’t seem to care.

I’m not sure he understood how much time I was there.  How much time I spent auditioning a life in that house before our relationship got all that serious.  I picked him.  I wanted him.  I didn’t have to look around the local community for more than three months before I was damn sure he was the only person in that lot I wanted to seriously pursue.  And I did.  And on our first date he told me that he was looking for the One.  The One he would marry and have children with.

I am not going to get into it much right now.  That’s too big of a story.  I can’t do that today.  I can’t write it down today.  But I can sit here and listen to Adele sing.  And I cry.  Because I can’t write that story yet.  I am in the middle of another one.

I date Puppy because I was trying to replace Tom.  Puppy was the most abusive relationship I have had as an adult.  If he had not ended it when he did I think he would have hit me.  He was escalating in his violent displays when I didn’t react how he wanted.  I wasn’t good enough for him.  His family hated me and picking me would have meant ostracizing his family.  Or having to have relationships with them that involved no discussion of his life with me.  He didn’t think I was worth it.  He was a nasty piece of shit to me trying to get me to break up with him.  When my response was to cry for a while then try to problem solve he freaked out.  He wanted me to do something nasty so he had justification for his behavior.  I feel like my relationship with Puppy absolves me of my guilt for treating Steve so badly.  I learned how to control that anger.  I’m really sorry I fucked up like that at 18.  But I learned.  I changed.  Some people never do.  I’m proud of myself.

I am too angry with Noah.  Almost none of it is directed at him.  I’m not angry because of anything related to Noah.  I’m just angry.  At so many stupid things I remember and can’t let go of.  So many things that I’m trying to write down and be done with.  Puppy left me with a nasty email about how I will end up bitter and alone.  Just. Like. His. Mother.  Yeah, that’s about me?  I think not.

I don’t need to feel bad for my part in that any more.  That was a shitty relationship.  I don’t think it escalated to abuse but it wanted to.  It didn’t partially because I learned to control my temper.  That’s pretty cool.  I needed to do that.  It was essential in helping me be a good teacher.  And oh boy is it more important as a mother.  I’m sorry I hurt Steve.  But I forgive myself.  I had good reasons to be angry.  The more of this book I write the more I understand why people in authority positions widen their eyes when I tell my stories.  I should be exploding with anger.  I should be standing on top of a tall building with a machine gun taking my rage out on all of humanity.  That’s what a wounded animal as smart as me would do.

For all that people tell me I’m an angry person, I’m not.  Not really.  I was.  I’m sad.  I’m afraid.  Writing my story down all in one block and thinking about how many years of my life I have spent alone in a room is hard.  I don’t know how to have a real live actual family.  I’m scared.

I dated Tom for more years than I lived with my brother Jimmy after the age of three.  I lived with Tom for almost as many years as I lived with Tommy.  We were very close.  But he could never decide if I was really worth so much effort.  He wasn’t interested in getting married and having kids with me.  I think that given his life priorities, he made the right decision.  I’m not the right kind of girl for him.  And that still hurts.  I wanted to be.  I tried so hard to be what I thought he wanted.  Oh so many things I want to say.  They come over me in waves, these memories.

But I don’t think I can be friends with Tom.  We were too much.  I want too much.  I miss too much.  I want too much of him still.  I don’t know if anything could ever actually work.  I’m not going to let myself think about it.  I can’t.  I ran away.  I slammed the door on that part of my life pretty hard.  It has taken many years for me to figure out that some people in that community can be my friends because they aren’t actually interested in being his friend.  I didn’t have to ask them to pick a side!  They came pre-picked!  I’m a shallow piece of shit.

No, I have problems with boundaries.  I don’t think I would be able to have any if I spent extended time with Tom.  Once again, I don’t know that it is even sex I want.  I want to crawl back into his head.  I want to once again hear him tell me about the most intense parts of himself.  I want to watch him enjoy driving.  I want to be tied up.  I wouldn’t mind it being non-sexual.  I miss being enjoyed for just being there to look at.  That’s something that’s hard to communicate about objectification.  It means that someone doesn’t have to know all of my dirty stupid little secrets, they can enjoy looking at me.  Maybe I am beautiful.

Maybe if I write about what I really miss in enough detail I can find a way to get those specific needs met in other ways.  It’s worth a try.  But not today.  Maybe someday I will find someone like Tom.  Maybe I will be able to figure it out.

Daydreaming is weird.  Because I have these thoughts.  I have them a lot when I’m driving.  Polyamory means that I can have my Bridges of Madison County track in the back of my brain and know that I am not being disloyal to the people in front of me.

I feel sad that Noah does the same thing.  I don’t know that he does it exactly the same way I do.  But he has similar yearnings to not feel like doors are closed.  There is one girl he is kind of bitter about.  I handled it badly.  He really was falling in love.  It felt like watching my chance at stable happiness leave every time he went on a date.  I don’t trust that anyone else can love more than one person at a time.  My family couldn’t do that.  One kid at a time was “special” and whoever wasn’t in the center… well… when my brothers weren’t at the center it was because they weren’t there.  Sometimes when my mother and I lived alone somewhere I was the center.  That was wonderful.  Anytime there was anyone else around I was ignored.  She had missed those kids the whole time she had me.  She had talked about that endlessly.  She didn’t talk about me in glowing terms the way she did them.  She didn’t idealize me.  She lived with me.

I don’t want to be that for Noah.  I’m scared.  It is so hard to trust him.  It is so hard to trust anyone.  There is no one else in the world I would even bother to try to trust like I trust Noah.  I can’t.  I’m not capable.  And that hurts.  Once people have been close to me like that, if they fuck up even slightly then I have to completely and totally evaporate from their lives.  I can’t handle being demoted.  When Noah starts paying attention to someone else I feel demoted.  I go from being the wife to being part of the harem.  Now I’m “one of Noah’s girls”.  I feel disposable.  It’s not true.  I know Noah doesn’t feel that way.  Not even slightly.  But that’s what I feel.

You know.  Once I get the problem nailed down this specifically it’s time to talk to the California Mindfucker.  I like NLP.  It’s a convenient tool.  I keep hitting this same wall.  And it’s not rational.  I can explain it 50 more times and they will all come down to the same thing.  I want to change my irrational feelings and I’m not managing on my own.  There are tricks for that.

I love planning

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I’m in the middle of 1993.  I hope to finish through high school today (class of ’99).  I haven’t done pre 1988 yet.  The early stuff is slightly speculative because my memories are hazy.  I feel guilt writing something down as true when I have a less than crystal clear memory.  I will do it.  But I’m going to do the first pass through the older stuff first.  I think I should reserve next Monday for the early bits.  It will need to be done in a big burst.

Ok, that’s a good timeline for me.  I want to get up to 2010 this week.  Then I can do the earliest bits on Monday of next week.  That means I will have the first pass of the whole story done by the 15th.  I’m already feeling frustrated with myself for the bits I have missed.  I’ll need the whole last half of the month to reread and add stories in here and there.

The first pass is just giving the skeleton.  Where did I live.  What kinds of schools.  I haven’t gotten into too many awful bits.  I’m saving them.  I don’t want this story to be, “Krissy’s shitty life”.  So much happened and a lot of it was amazing.  It feels important to be true to the scope of the story and not overemphasis the trauma.

We’ll see.

Why I want to be a stay at home mom

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So I was watching the Steve Jobs speech at Stanford and it occurred to me that I should spend some serious time thinking about why I am a stay at home mom.  I’ve been having internal pushback towards my decision making process lately and I think I need more clarity.

I view parenting as accompanying your child through an apprenticeship to adulthood.  One that my mother failed at.  My mother gave me adult responsibilities when I was very young.  I had to be responsible for myself in a way that was not appropriate or fair.  And I failed often.  The result was that I got hurt often.  I don’t instinctively know what skills a child would have to avoid problematic people.  I don’t want to teach my children to be just like me.

I don’t think my aggression is an ideal life attitude.  And I want my kids to be allowed to be them.  I don’t know how to do that without looking at them all day long.  I don’t know how to bond in a shorter time span than that.  I believe that working mothers love their children just as much as I do.  I don’t know how they find time in the day to deal with that much emotion.  I can’t.  It overloads me.  Having to be patient and interactive with them is incredibly difficult.  If I had other things adding stress to my life (like a job) I would be nasty and mean and vicious pretty much all the time.  It is hard for me to be nice and I find that embarrassing.

I only know how to get through the bad days by having a lot of control over every single solitary thing I say and do all day.  You can’t do that and have a job.  So really, I just don’t want to have a job.  No.  That’s not true.  I do not believe I am capable of managing the stress of a job and the stress of children.  I would not be pleasant, ever.  Dealing with my mental health takes up too much time, honestly.

And I am getting to discover what it is like to unfold in a safe, gradually expanding environment.  I am watching how Shanna changes.  It’s amazing to me to look at her in all of her grumpy glory and think, “That is in absence of any external stress whatsoever.  Hunh.  How does that jive with what I remember doing/being/saying?”  I’m learning what it means that someone else can’t “make” you feel something.  My children get on my nerves.  That is kind of their job.  When I lose my temper and start yelling at them I have this huge hammer in my brain hitting me as hard as possible saying, “She’s a fucking three year old!  She doesn’t know this is an annoying thing to do!  You are supposed to be helping her learn not berating her for her inadequacies!!”  I feel like my anger is not supposed to be part of the equation.

Do you know why I feel that way?  Because in my family you weren’t allowed to address small injustices or issues.  You were required to stay silent through small problems and big problems alike.  I was supposed to just smile and “be pleasant”.  “Why is your tone of voice so nasty all the time” was the favored thing to tell me.  I learned that I was simply an unpleasant person because I wanted them to stop “playing” with me in ways that hurt me.  I was a whiner.  At least according to them.  And looking at Shanna… I can understand why people around me didn’t notice that anything wrong was happening.

If I put my hand around Shanna’s hand to hold it when she’s not in the mood it doesn’t matter if I am holding her with so little pressure I barely encircle her hand.  “It huuuuuuuuuuuurts.”  I feel like I’m going to lose my mind.  She is constantly whining about how much I am hurting her, when I am not even touching her body.  When I am walking towards her with the hair brush she starts crying and clutching her head and rolling around the floor sobbing because I have hurt her.  When I haven’t touched her yet.  I did that too.

Do you know what my mom did?  She probably thought she was just trying to get it over with as fast as possible.  Oh how I screamed.  I have done the same thing to Shanna.  You pull them over to the couch, hold them between your knees, and as fast as possible you get the knots out no matter how they squirm.  But my would start with a fine tooth comb at the top of my head and yank.  I have a baby brush with soft bristles and I start at the ends and I pull knots apart with my fingers.  I don’t think Shanna is reacting to what I am doing less than I reacted to my mother.  I sincerely believe that Shanna experiences actual physical pain for less than 10% of the time I am brushing her hair.  My mother could be gentle but when she was in a hurry… well… that was that.  And she was in a hurry a lot.  I was the youngest of four.  She worked most of my life.

If I had to hurry and get Shanna ready for daycare before I got ready for work we would not have a pleasant relationship.  She wakes up slow.  We generally sit in a chair for half an hour cuddling before we do anything at the beginning of each day.  Calli is joining us now.  Then Noah makes breakfast and the kids go back and forth between us.  If I also had to get ready for work then, that would be the end of my writing and relaxing.  That is when I have that time.  The other tasks would get managed somehow by someone else.  I would just lose writing.

It’s hard for me to actually admit that I need this writing.  It feels so banal, so unimportant.  Why would anyone ever care about anything I have to say?  Who the fuck am I?  Because if I’m telling you the truth I want people to read this.  I want people to give a shit what I say.  But I’m not sure anyone should.  Have I thought anything useful?  Have I taught anything?  I don’t know.  Not enough, I’m sure.  What is teaching anyway?  When I worked as a high school teacher my goal was to have the kids be able to argue with me more by the end of the year.  I want them to be ever increasingly sure of their own opinions.  I want them to be able to talk in finer and finer detail about what they believe.  Because only once they can talk about it can they really be a fully integrated person and deal with their little hypocrisies.

I actively want to avoid being a hypocrite.  That means being very sure what my priorities are and changing my behavior when it’s not in alignment.  It’s hard.  It means I don’t get to coast for long.  What are my priorities.

Me.
Noah, Shanna, Calli, Sarah.  Not necessarily in that order.  Spending time with them.
Writing
Learning/Reading
Socializing with other people
Gardening
Housecleaning
Cooking

It’s a short and broad list to start with. That means that when I sit down to read a book to Shanna I am not evading my housekeeping duties.  I’m following my priority list.  I want to stick my tongue out at an imaginary person now.  I feel like there is some judge and jury out there who is going to tell me I am a bad mother because I want to sit in the garage and smoke pot instead of clean my house.  Seriously.  Who the fuck wouldn’t agree with me?  I’m writing, damnit.  Why am I writing.  Why does writing matter.

Writing lets me get out the stupid shit I am thinking about into a format where I can see it, understand it, and recognize that it is idiotic.  If it is just running around and around and around in my brain… I don’t know how to get off the train.  The writing changes it from a train on a circular trap to a traffic loop.  Yes, it is possible to get caught in the center if you are being dumb, but there are exits all fucking over the place.  Just pick one.  Are any of them really worthwhile?  I don’t know.  I don’t know if anyone will read my writing one day and feel like I made their life better.  I gave them an idea they didn’t have before and it made their life just a little easier.  I feel like it is so hard for me to “act normal” that certainly some other people are also just acting and they might like a trick.

I loathe when people say, “Be yourself!”  Yourself is a bizarre construct of all the different influences you’ve had in your life + personal taste.  It’s pretty vague.  And let me tell you, when you do things you genuinely like (like making your hair increasingly AWESOME) people are quick to remind you that you are stepping out of the herd and you should stop that.  I think I dyed my hair because it makes me visually a freak but it doesn’t cause any more pain to my body.  I think that is a god damn excellent direction of progress.

I want to be a stay at home mom because some accident of fate handed me a partner with sufficient money to support me all my life in a manner to which I would like to become accustomed.  We’ve been married for five years.  Until now I have contributed enough to pay for my truly unnecessary stuff.  I was self-sufficient enough.  Now I have no form of income.  Now I am completely dependent on someone else for the first time since I was 15.

Of course I’m secretly having a fucking heart attack and hoping that I do a good enough job in November that I can sell the book.  I don’t want to be a god damn dependent.  But I don’t want to do anything that requires me to deal with other people.  Err, well, that kind of limits the options.  And honestly I wouldn’t take a random retail job right now.  For one thing it would be hard to get someone to hire me because I am so overqualified.  I think I could overcome that though.  It’s called lying.  But I would feel guilty for taking that job away from someone who needs it more.  I don’t want an office job.  I don’t want anything where I have to be doing additional work.  Ha.  I feel like being the housefrau maid for my family is enough fucking work this lifetime, thanks.  And I want to write.  And my husband wants me to write.

I have such intense feelings about Noah’s perception of my writing.  He takes it more seriously and gives it more respect than I do.  I think that Noah is the one who convinced me that I am a writer.  That anyone who compulsively feels the need to write 10-20 pages a day is a fucking writer.  That’s just not normal.  Normal. Normal. Normal.  I hate that word so much and I use it constantly.  I think it goes a long way towards wrecking the meaning I am going for.

Why am I so god damn compelled to be just like everyone else?  When I stand near people too long I start acting like them.  I conform.  I do it in subtle ways at first, then loud, then I explode and yell at them and make it seem like I was being oppressed by the ways I was conforming.  Even if the other person was unaware of the whole situation.  They are just standing there confused.  In my family the constant chatter is about telling you what to think, when to think it, how to think it.  So someone sitting there and telling you something about how they handled a situation is fairly explicitly giving you directions on how you are expected to handle it in the future.  You know that whole, “Childhood as apprenticeship for adulthood” thing I have?

Until fairly recently my aunt and uncle were supporting their three adult disabled children.  And a bunch of grandkids and SOs.  Because they reinforce one another’s behaviors.  They will rise or fall as a unit.  They are all so ridiculously similar it isn’t funny.  Like obsessions with collecting useless things.  Everyone has a different animal.  For every holiday under the sun people compete to find you something with that animal on it.  But they are all dirt poor.  So all the stuff is cheap, ugly, and really pointless.  And they have LOTS of it.  That’s one small point, but they do the same thing with everything.

When I walk into a middle class persons house I instantly put on my ‘acting’ face.  I start to imagine, “How would people who live here behave?”  Do you want to know why I paint my house really dark colors?  Because I grew up in houses with dark wood paneling.  They were caves.  I don’t know how to cope with relentlessly white walls.  We had relentlessly white walls in a series of depressing, horrible rental places.  Or ugly paneling that turned the house into a dark cave.

So I painted my house purple and cornflower blue and green and raspberry and navy blue…. among other colors.  They are dark enough to make me feel calm and settled.  Aunt Vonnie’s houses were the home base.  That was as much of a home as I knew.  That feeling is in a dark house… even though it bugs me.  I don’t want to be the kind of person who has a uniformly dark house.  It feels oppressive to me.  But I like darker, more saturated colors.  Who says a house has to look like the materials came that color direct from nature?  I never got that memo.  I guess I ditched that day at school.

This constant attempt to conform to whomever I am standing near creates problems.  Because then I get angry at the person for “making” me feel like I have to conform and be like them.  I have had this problem in particular with a couple of female friends.  We will be having an intense conversation about something and they are giving advice and all of a sudden I go ballistic and start screaming because I don’t want to be like them.

I don’t know how to handle those feelings very well.  That sudden explosion of fear that they are trying to wipe me off the planet.  I know that it was that fear that got me out of my family.  I respect that fear.  I respect the fact that my individuality comes with a rock solid fist to defend it.  But I really wish I wouldn’t hit my friends.  They haven’t done anything.  This is my fuck up.

I am struggling with the fact that my self control runs out.  I have too many things I am trying to control. I don’t know how to relax and let go of the anger in the moment very well.  It cycles so fast out of no where.  When I am at home I take a time out.  It’s not perfect because I’m doing too much stomping away/slamming doors.

The only normal I care about is the one where my kids aren’t afraid of me.  I don’t want my kids to quake with fear from my voice.  That is not a relationship I want.  But I want to be effective.  Three sucks.

I want to be a stay at home mom so that my kids and I can learn how to be nice to each other without outside pressure.  We can learn how to be a family together.  Because really I don’t know much more than them.  Luckily Shanna is an excellent teacher.  She’s having an emotional period, but mostly she can talk about her preferences and make requests and follow directions.  She is in a rough phase (the book told me to expect it! I love that book) and that’s ok.  Hormones are rough.  I try to be gentle and understanding.  For her, this is just a phase because nothing bad has ever really happened to her.  Minor injuries and scrapes.  Losing her friend Rowan was the biggest loss she’s been aware of.  If I am patient and loving, she will come through this and on the other side she will hopefully understand that three year olds are assholes and I was really nice to her.  This is part of the circle of life.  I wish I could apologize to my mother for some pieces of it.

But that is when we jump on the merry go round again.  I don’t think my mother abused me as a small child.  I think she neglected me to such a degree that it becomes criminal.  I think she tried to enculturate with the only thing she knew… and it worked.  I am indeed, white trash.  Even that didn’t go how she planned.  One of the strongest and most defining things about white trash as I understand the concept is the fierce loyalty.  Blood is everything.  How do you think they get away with incest?  If you are related to someone you are obligated to do anything they want… forever.

Excuse me while I pause to vomit on the floor.  I respond to feeling like I should conform with hostility and aggression because it was a very useful tool at one point.  My friends aren’t trying to convert me though.  Gah.

I should stop writing.  It’s already too long.  But I don’t want to.  This is the problem with trying to do shorter entries.  I don’t always see a clear stopping/starting/dividing line.  How do I talk about things in separate posts when it is all one big concept in my head?  But then I ask and people tell me, yes they would prefer shorter posts.  And then I feel like I am failing to deliver something that people want.  I wish I didn’t do this to myself.  Shit.  This is over twelve pages long.  Ok, I’ll stop.  And it took me just over an hour.  That’s actually kind of hot.

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I always feel confused when people say I have a lot of triggers.  I’m not even sure what that means, exactly.  I know that I can be bopping along reading a sweet letter from a mother to a daughter about Santa and burst into tears because all in a flash I think of my mother.  I think that my mother didn’t actually get to have visits from Santa when she was a child.  The first Christmas stocking my mother ever got in her life she got from me when I was 16.  I was absolutely horrified when I understood that she had been filling stockings for her children for 29 years and she had never gotten one herself, ever.  My dad was an asshole; he got one every year of their 15 year marriage.

I have been married for five years.  Somehow I doubt that their marriage was like mine five years in.  For my mom and dad that is when Jimmy was being born.  All of my mom’s stories about my dad are tinged with bitterness, so I can’t get a straight answer about anything.  He was an addict, I’m sure it was up and down.  Noah doesn’t seem to think I am an addict.  I suppose that’s good.  Things are up and down anyway.

It’s interesting how music is universal.  Yes, that’s a topic shift.  You can listen to a song and feel identification with it no matter how close your actual life experiences are.  At the moment I’ve got Journey, “Don’t Stop Believing” and if ever there was a song that lots of people feel inspired by… even while they know they are drowning in their own cheese.  This song is increasingly popular again.  And it’s not because it’s a great song.  It’s cheesy and pretty silly.  But it’s fun and it’s how I find my pleasure.  I have a play list called “healing”.  I haven’t listened to much else in the past year.  Periodically I will hear a song on the radio and add it.  It’s four hours long.  These are the songs I listen to over and over again.  I like songs like Dolly Parton’s “Better Get To Livin'”.

This is a mixed thing because unless I only pick music that has been written in the past ten years… I have associations with my early life with most songs I would pick.  I sit back and think of driving with my mom.  I must have been six or seven.  It was before the accident.  We were singing along with the Four Tops on the tape player.  Same Old Song.  “It’s the same old song, but with a different meaning since you’ve been gone.”  I had no negative associations with music then.  We were singing along loudly.  The windows were down and there was a nice warm breeze.

I remember stretching back in the seat, back in those days six year olds sat in the front seat without a seat belt.  Shhh don’t tell anyone.  The seat belt law was passed when I was four.  I found out about it in school when I was eight.  I read my mother the riot act and I started insisting on wearing one.  I also made her wear one.  That is why the government wants children in public school, just saying.

I looked at my mom while she sang along.  She was so cheerful and happy.  She was hardly ever happy.  She was usually sad.  If that song came on the radio while I was on the freeway I might cause an accident because I would cry so hard.  I miss my mom.

Recently I sent my friend this article on gaslighting.  In further conversation with him I made a point that I realized is the point for me.  I’m tired of having to defend my arguments basic validity.  Not that I think I shouldn’t have to argue my side of the issue.  I’m tired of having to bring in a long list of sources before I am “allowed” to have my side.  Before I have proven that my side is an acceptable side for someone to hypothetically have.  This. 

What does it mean to be triggered?  Isn’t everything all connected for everyone?

Guns, cars, and computers

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Noah has kind of a chip on his shoulder about munches.  I understand why.  They tend to only be welcoming towards someone if large numbers of people in the crowd want to fuck the new person.  I think that Noah would walk into a munch now and be catnip.  When he was in his early 20’s… not so much.  That’s how it works for guys though.  I showed up at 18.  There is no meat tastier, than fresh meat.

When I talk about the culture of bdsm I was raised in, it was defined primarily by the munch group I hung out with.  It took a long time before I really understood in the core of me that kink communities are completely different from location to location because the local members create something different in each place.  I feel kind of like a moron for that.  In my location it didn’t matter what race, age, gender you were… the desires were all pretty similar.  I didn’t understand that we chased away the people who weren’t exactly like us.

We had a high bar for entry.  You had to be willing to devote a huge chunk of your life to doing bdsm in order to count as a “real” pervert.  There was a lot a strange overlap with guns, cars, and computers.  You had to be fairly passionately into one or more of those in order to fit in at our munch.  Most of the crew is Libertarian, though basically sane people.  I learned a lot sitting at their knees.  This is decidedly where I formed most of my political opinions because they gave me ways to be uppity towards my family.

I don’t even know how to write about them.  Stephen King would want to whap me with a newspaper for that.  You can’t reach that point as a writer.  Ok, what do I think of when I think of the munch?  I think of a sea of happy faces.  I remember being the pet/mascot.  I was an indulged child for most of my early time there.  Mostly the crowd is married.  Mostly the crowd is mostly monogamous.  There was a lot of puppy pile bdsm.  I don’t know how common that is in other areas.

The Saturday parties were interesting because we all spent so much time together that there was a lot of cross-play amongst friends.  Things like bondage and skilled SM arts were treated like commodities to be shared because there weren’t enough partners to go around.  There was a lot of implicit, “Well you played with so and so and I want to be next.”  The play was kept non-sexual because then it wasn’t about whoring yourself out.  It was sharing skills.  It’s a hobby.  It’s really not much different than getting together a whole group of friends at a commercial kitchen to share ingredients as you make batches of cookies.  Having that kind of intimacy that is not intimate is kind of weird for me.  I do it very well.  I sometimes wonder if that place at that time was just the only way I felt safe getting touched.  For all that they were “perverts” they were remarkably safe people.

A lot of the thing was the whole crowd was focused on exhibitionism.  Play parties would often involve a couple playing in the middle of the living room while everyone laughed and commented and decided the tone of the play.  There were quite a few heavy masochists in the crowd so the play could be intense physically while still being entirely lighthearted.  This was not an environment for serious edge play or psychological play.  Except when it was.  There were always the ability to steal away and do something more intense.  We did, often.  Knives were quite popular amongst the group.  Not cutting, but scratching and threatening.

It’s hard for me to convey how convivial the atmosphere was.  The crowd was more men than women, but it wasn’t that unequal feeling to me.  The men were more intensely regular.  The women came and went.  So if you showed up at the munch on a random week it might be 90% men, or it could be 50/50 because all the girls came.  That felt ok to me because the women were there most of the time.  It was always safe.  No one else was under 30.  Many had kids.  Some of them–I never ever met their kids.  They kept their children 100% separated from most scene people.  You had to earn access to their kids over many years of good behavior.  I fucking respected them.  Notice how I never earned access to their kids?  I was not good at good behavior.

I was indulged universally in my inappropriate acting out.  Some of the women tried to tactfully mentor me on how to get along better in life but I ignored it.  The guys encouraged me heartily.  It was all pretty harmless shit.  I liked to sit on laps and snuggle.  I did a lot more grinding than was strictly appropriate.  No one minded one little bit.  We would do mini-scenes in the coffee shop.  We shouldn’t have been doing it in public because there were random people there.  It was fun.  I don’t feel very guilty.   I do, however, feel like I don’t know how to interact with those people very well without falling into those behavior patterns.  If I want to stop acting like that… I can’t talk to those people any more.

When I broke up with Tom all of a sudden I started getting a different kind of interest.  Actual serious interest.  I ran like a scared rabbit.  All of a sudden these weren’t the gentle friends I had been doing light social play with.  They were potential sex partners and that scared the shit out of me.  I didn’t want to have to have sex with all of them.  So I left the group.  From the cheap seats I see that not one of those men would have pressured me for sex.  They would have asked, once, and forever more tried to make due appreciating what I was willing to offer freely.  By and large they are timid men.

When I think about my assholes with great affection it is funny how many of them I met at the Wednesday munch.  This is where I learned geek culture.  It isn’t much like the geek culture Noah talks loudly about.  They talk about computers, sure.  But they spend equal amounts of time talking about guns, cars, and politics really.  But the politics are interesting so I tend to leave it out of my bitching.  I probably ranted more than a hundred times how tired I was of hearing about guns, cars, and computers.  So in order to distract them from boring conversations I would remind them that they were at a bdsm munch now talk about something more interesting.  I would end up being passed from lap to lap as they talked about what they would do to me.  It was great fun.  A very predictable game.

Except when it wasn’t.  I learned who was safe and who wasn’t.  I felt like Tom gave me a layer of protection.  The whole group was tortured by not having sex.  Only a few of them were more desperate acting in how they dealt with that.  In all the years I hung out there we never had any whisper of actual abuse.  In retrospect I believe that this group of people really did find a safe and supporting environment to be kind of weird.  Sure we all egged each other on, but we didn’t do extreme things mostly.  There was a lot of encouragement to find where your actual limit was.

Bdsm was something to treat as an enthusiastic physical hobby.  You practiced your skills by yourself to hone them early on.  You were expected to take it seriously and do it well so that you could have something to be proud of.  In tangent Tom and I were part of the national convention circuit.  It feels kind of funny to say that, but it’s true.  We traveled to a lot of events and did spectacular public play.  I was very young and he was in his 30’s and doing well in business.  We were a striking couple and we had a lot of fun together.  Our play was show stopping.  In public we did suspension whenever possible and took over as much space as we could.  Tom was constantly on the search for hard points higher than our ceiling.  Ostensibly the reason we did it in public so much more than in private was because it isn’t as fun to only barely get off the ground.  Fetishists are weird.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m the one who negotiated access to mumblemumble so that we could do a suspension that got me 75′ off the ground.  We did do things in private if they had enough brag value.  There are lots of pictures.  What play we did in private was done mostly so that it could be photographed.  So he could look at/think about it while masturbating.  Did I mention we didn’t have sex much?  I really struggled with that.  My sexuality was constantly being used in a way that didn’t involve me.  I was getting off–Tom masturbated me constantly.  But I didn’t get to have intimacy with my orgasms.  I just got off a lot.  I’m not sure if I miss it or not.  I can’t do it any more.  Orgasm is hard now. I often can’t.

A large portion of Tom’s sexuality was exhibitionism.  It was about being seen doing those things.  The girlfriend before me made him go private and that was brutally hard for him.  He needs to have a community of fellow “perverts” where he is totally accepted.  That’s ok.  I have spent the last seven years trying to figure out how much of it was his exhibitionism and how much was mine.  Because I have some, don’t get me wrong.  I like having sex and/or doing bdsm in front of people.  I like knowing that I am what people think about when they masturbate.  My munch friends told me that I was.  It was almost like being a porn model only my adoring fans were my friends.  It worked.

There was a pretty strong D/s contingent in our little community.  Not absolutely everyone practiced D/s (Dominance/submission) but it was common enough that everyone knew everyone else’s roles and treated people differently based on their chosen role.  It was “respecting that persons self identity”.  Hilarious.  But it was all in good fun.  People drifted away when life or work got busy.  It was remarkably Cheers like.  I miss it, but going now isn’t the same.

I have blissfully forgotten most of what I could once rattle off about guns, cars, and computers.  Noah is a software guy, it’s a different kind of conversation.  I was used to hardware boys.  Hardware boys that wanted me to dress them up in full latex then tie them up in mostly comfortable positions.  Then they would struggle while I playfully sat on them.  It wasn’t all that sexy because I was not willing to make it all that sexy.  I did touch them and cuddle them though.  I talked to them.  I verbally played out their fantasies.  I felt like a force for good.

I keep having a Lady Gaga line go through my head, “In the most Biblical sense, I am beyond repentance/ Fame hooker, prostitute wench, vomits her mind.”  I tattooed on my back that I want to forgive myself.  I want forgiveness.  I want forgiveness for everything I do.  Everything I am.  I feel intense conflict about writing the things I write because other people have different perceptions.  Someone else can be part of a conversation with me and remember totally different things and come away with a different impression.  I don’t think either of us are “wrong” but we are shaped by our experiences.  We hear the things that affirm our view of the world.  There is a strong attitude that if someone is doing something only meaning the best then it’s ok.  They didn’t mean for anything bad to happen so they aren’t responsible.

No one at the munch did anything bad to me.  They were good friends, actually.  But it was a continuation of the idea that I had to be available sexually.  It’s not what they thought.  It’s what I thought.  I was surprised how many of the munch crowd came to my birthday party.  In a flash as the song switches to Hair, oh man.  They would all love to still be my friend.  All I have to do is figure out how to spend time with them.  They like me.  They really like me.

Why am I sitting at home crying to Lady Gaga instead of out seeing my friends?  What am I so afraid of?  I’m afraid my children will misbehave and people will think I am a bad parent.  I’m afraid that people expect me to be sexy and I can’t be right now.  I’m afraid that if I go out I will feel uncomfortable and bad and I will sit in a corner and no one will talk to me because I have made myself invisible.  I’m afraid that I don’t know how to have friendships without sex.  I’m afraid that I don’t know how to listen.  I am a bad listener.  I can listen well when there is one other person in the room.  I can’t listen in a crowd.  I am too distractible.  I feel like being a bad listener in a crowd makes me a bad friend.  I don’t hang out with anyone enough to be able to do comfortable casual party conversation.  I feel awkward.

I sit in my house and invite one person at a time.  We have intense conversations.  I get the impression that the intense conversations at my house are slightly traumatic to some of my friends.  I feel like that when we invite the sensitive, quiet introverts over.

Maybe I should invite some of my guns, cars, and computer boys.  I miss them.  I’d kind of like to know more about them.  I’d like to ask them what they experienced ten years ago.  I’m willing to bet their memory is different from mine.  I bet they didn’t think of me as being available sexually.  The thought actually makes me laugh.  I was so nasty with them.  I learned how to taunt.  I felt vulnerable and I showed that vulnerability.  Then I let them know that I am absolutely full grown and here are my steel toed high heels, mother fucker.  I was absolutely one of the nastiest sadists in the group.

Years ago I asked one of them why he never asked me to play again.  He laughed out loud and said, “You are kind of intimidating, you know.”  I think that is so funny.  I’m intimidating because I go through life in terror that at any moment someone will hurt me or betray me.  I don’t think I should be intimidating.  Let me rephrase.

I don’t want to be intimidating.  I want my boundaries to be clear.  I like being easy to get or impossible to get.  I don’t want to feel like I am required to sleep with anyone who asks.  I like feeling like it’s ok for people to ask.  I go to spaces where that sort of asking is ok.  I don’t go on the nights I don’t want to be asked.  I don’t understand why I am so intimidating when I show up quaking like a scared rabbit.  I like being able to say, “I am really enjoying our flirting, but I need to be clear that this isn’t going anywhere.” Sometimes when I say that people get angry with me.  One person told me, “Now you ruined everything.”  He hasn’t flirted with me in years.  I guess he was more interested than me.  I meant that night.  I probably would have been open to being asked out on an actual date.  But sometimes I’m not up for going home with someone after a group social event.  I didn’t get adequate personal attention during our brief heavy breathing sessions in a dark corner.  It’s a faux pas to be clear.

I’m afraid that I don’t know how to talk to people.  I’m too blunt.  I can’t observe social niceties.  I’m afraid that the things I say are unacceptable.  I write because these are the things I think about and I can’t talk about them.  I want to invite two or three people from the munch era over to my house and ask them to talk about their impression of that time.  I want to know what other people saw of me and my life.  I missed fewer than twenty Wednesdays in four years.  I spent a lot of time around these people.  More time than I have spent in any other social group in my life.  I often know people for longer than that, but I rarely spend a lot of time with people.  I have been alone in a room for most of my life.

Fisher Middle School was the only school I ever attended for two consecutive years as a child.  We moved three times, but I stayed in the same school.  Before I was 18 years old I never had a group of friends for more than two years.  Ever.  I was part of the theatre community in college for almost two years but I ditched them after I broke up with Stephen.  Stephen was already working all over the local community college scene and I knew that staying in the theatre world would mean that I would keep doing the make up/break up thing with him.  I left theatre because I couldn’t deal with seeing Stephen and not sleeping with him.

After we broke up I pierced my nipples.  He hadn’t let me while we were together.  He also hadn’t let me shave my pubic hair.  I did that too.  I uhh went over to visit with him once.  I don’t remember why.  I taunted him with the fact that I had done these things.  He wad interested.  I showed him my breasts.  He decided it wasn’t all bad.  I didn’t sleep with him but it was a close and creepy thing.  Me breaking those taboos was a serious turn on for him.  He’s a minister’s kid.  He was repressive with me because he was encultrated that way.  He probably could have been more corruptible than I thought he was.  But I didn’t want to be the corrupter.  I wanted to be corrupted.  So I ran off into the bdsm world.  And found this weird hobbyist sexuality.

I don’t think I really understand this sex business.  I go back and forth in my brain between, “Dude my dad raped me” and “I kind of wish that one guy had asked me to sleep with him…” and “I’m as free as my hair.”  I think I look like shit as a blonde.  I should get more blue dye.  I really like the blue.

I’m weird.  I have these things in me that make people uncomfortable.  I blurt things out inappropriately.  And gosh darn it.  People like me.  I think I kind of miss guns, cars, and computers.

Being other

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I’m going to do NaNoWriMo this year.  I’ve never done it before.  I’ve always been too intimidated.  I want to write honest to goodness fiction.  But because I’m me it will be creative non-fiction instead. 😛  I want to rewrite my life.  I want to take the time to play in my head with some of the “might have beens” in my life. Stephen King says that if you want to write a book you have to do it in private, so the blog will see very little traffic in November.  I sort of feel like October is necessarily my time to do more of a run through of what happened for real and all.  Mmmm writers block.  I remember your sweet smell.  You always bring cookies.

I feel really weirdly conflicted about what I am trying to do, what I am trying to say.  Why does it have value?  Why does it have worth?  Why do I need to justify my life choices?  What am I doing?  Why am I important enough to talk about?  At this point I have to do it and get it over with because I have several hundred friends on facebook and even if only ten of them actually read the announcement, come hell or high water at the end of November I will have a book done.  I have been talking about doing this all my life.  Some day I will write down my life story.  It will be a terrible book.  I want to get past the terrible parts of my life so I can enjoy the parts that are really pretty wonderful.

I believe in the pit of my stomach that there is a story in me waiting to get out that many people will want to read.  Millions.  I’m afraid that I am too afraid to write it.  I am afraid that I am going to look for evasions.  I’m afraid I am going to instead write 3 million blog posts full of unuseful and misleading digressions.  I have something to say.  It will take a lot of words to do it.  But there is something useful in it.  It matters.  I tell myself that when I have insomnia at 5 am at least.  It’s hubris.  But I want there to be an awful lot of people who will cry when I die.  That will give me a reason to keep fighting.  And I’m too fucked up to have that as something I can deal with much in my day to day life.  So I have to keep people far away from me.

Viktor Frankl says that people can survive anything, anything, if they just have something they are living for.  People survived Auswitch because they wanted to find their mates, children, etc.  I didn’t survive torture.  But I did survive a pretty ridiculous amount of trauma.  When I talk to people about my life they react with horror, pity, disgust, sadness, and unfortunately sometimes empathy.  The degree of their reaction usually depends on how much detail I offer.  When I say, “I was abused” I get a lot of “Me too” from other people.  Then I keep talking.  There have only been a few women in my life who have met me head on and looked me full in the face while I have related anything like details.  I think Noah and Chris are the only men.  My story is too disgusting to tell.

That means that all the people who spout platitudes about how abuse sufferers shouldn’t compare trauma because people process things differently are actively damaging me.  I can not figure out how to go about living my fucking life because I’m told over and over again that abuse is abuse it is all the same and people tell me to just meditate and all my troubles will be over but the worst thing that happened to them is that their daddy touched them once through the sheet when they were 13.  I’m sorry.  My brain doesn’t work like yours.

I’m not coherent enough to delve into medical research, but I know that the research is there.  Trauma rewires your brain.  I am different from most people.  I think differently.  Throughout my entire life I have had issues in just about every place I go because my opinions are always off from the majority of the group no matter what group I am in.  I am discordant.  I don’t do it on purpose.  People tend to strongly dislike the discordant energy I bring.  Some of this is my imagination, some of it is true.  Being this kind of person is what allowed me to get away from my family.  It is why I am not wallowing in poverty with the rest of them continuing the abuse on to future generations.  Why the fuck should I have to feel bad because I think things other people don’t?

I survived.  I survived being raped over and over.  I survived being raised in a family with rampant drug addiction and alcoholism and my big problem is that my one year old and three year old trigger flashbacks so I anesthetize myself with pot so my time doesn’t wander.  I barely drink and it can’t be a bigger factor in my life because it hurts me physically too much.  Harder drugs just aren’t appealing because I don’t have the recovery time.  I’m turning to marathon running, which will require not smoking and dear god I don’t know what I will do.

This is what an honest to god healthy life looks like.  This is what the 95% have.  This is what normal people experience.  People like me don’t get here.  And I’m only kind of here.  I can’t be part of the 5%.  Because any time I chat with my neighbors I have to be very careful not to mention my sex life or my childhood.  Because even with our weird ass house… we are probably still normal, right?

If I write a book as good as my hubris tells me I can, my neighbors will figure something out.  Seriously. And that means that when people walk by my house they will whisper about me.  Oh bullshit.  They will talk loudly so I can hear it.  There will be people who think I am disgusting.  My children will have to face that.  Right now in this minute my friends who love me tell me that isn’t true.  I tell you it depends how many people read the book.  It depends if I actually get published.  If the book is published, I think it will sell.  If fucking lame ass Elizabeth Wurtzel can publish Prozac Nation…  Good God.  At least something actually happened to me that vaguely justifies my whining.  *ahem*

Who would I be if my life had taken different paths.  I don’t think that most people have as many wildly diverging options as I have had.  I can even imagine a fun, less self-destructive, path that would still lead to Noah.  I should write that tangent down.  Done.  That’s if I want to play with the idea of my One Twue Love.  He is pretty spiffy and all.  I don’t think I could do better no matter which rabbit hole I wander down.

As I’m thinking about how to write this book I realize how much my choices are influenced by the people who are standing closest to me.  I’m trying to think about what kind of people could have come into my life to lead it in a very different direction.  Like that girl I was friends with in Whittier.  When I lived in Whittier that was one of the darkest periods of my life, to use a Shamus Young phrase, and there was a girl who was my friend.  I can’t even remember her name.  She was the daughter of missionaries.  Her family was staying in a shitty house the church organization rented for them in between over seas placements.  She is the one who introduced me to books like A Wrinkle in Time; Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; The Secret Garden; The Island of the Blue Dolphins; Sideways Stories From Wayside School and biographies like Anne Frank and Helen Keller.  I was in 4th grade and I was in a serious rut.  I read nearly exclusively The Babysitters Club and I could read a new book in 20 minutes.  The other options in my house were pornographic romance novels.  I moved around so much that libraries weren’t really an option.  If you only stay in one place for three months as a young kid you don’t get around enough to go to libraries.  My mother didn’t consider such activities necessary.  That makes me think I should add the library to our weekly activities schedule.  Anyway.

So this one little girl, who happened to be the only other white kid in my class, talked to me.  She introduced me to classic childrens literature without knowing what she was doing.  She was just being near me.  I didn’t know many kids like her.  She was quiet and introspective.  Because of her upbringing she was unfailingly cheerful and big on advocating for Jesus, but that was worth the price of admission.

The first time I was invited over to her house after school was the last.  She stopped talking to me at school after that.  I went back to sitting on the edge of the playground alone.  I lived in that house for 18 months.  That was one of the shittiest periods of my life.  Third and fourth grades.  Tommy lived at home with us after he was released from the hospital.  He spent a lot of time trying to either kill me or rape me, he would probably have been happy to do either or both.  I bet he would have kept fucking my corpse.

The other kids at school taunted me about my “retarded” brother.  He would do things like run down the street naked.  He tried to attack kids.  Oh man.  I haven’t explained what Tommy was like after the accident.  Tommy was hit by a car May…something…1989.  He was in a coma for five months.  I was brought back to California by family friends (we had been living in Texas) because my mother flew out in advance to sit by Tommy’s bedside.  Because that is what you do when you are destitute and you have other kids to provide for, right?  You sit distraught next to one off-springs bedside and you completely abandon the rest of your obligations.

We lived with a lot of different people taking whatever hand outs were available.  When we got back to California it was a while before we found the house in Whittier and Tommy moved in with us.  I don’t know how much my dad paid but my mother eventually found a job.  I’m not sure how long we were homeless between Texas and Whittier.  My mom would try to claim we weren’t homeless, but we were couch surfing with friends and family.  I was watching my mom fuck a series of men to earn the shelter over our head.  I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want me to admit that out loud.  But that was my role model.  My mom went from guy to guy in between periods where she tried to feebly provide for herself and her kids and invariably things went badly.  She couldn’t earn enough money to make ends meet.  Only a couple of the people we stayed with were guys she was sleeping with (one was an old childhood sweetie and come on if you can’t leave your abusive second husband and run away to your old childhood sweetie, who can you run to?)  but the other one I remember distinctly is my uncle–my father’s brother.  So it wasn’t incest.  But it was awkward.  My fathers family appeared to me to have a pretty strict code that if a man was present it was the responsibility of whatever woman is present to fuck them.  My brothers expected it of me.  My father expected of me, my sister, and my mother even after they divorced.  My uncle traded sex for a roof for my mother and I.

These things are more complicated than they sound.  “My brother was in a horrendous accident so we stayed with my uncle for a while because his house was closest to the hospital.”  That sounds fine.  It doesn’t sound like we didn’t have anywhere to live.  Our stuff wasn’t with us.  I didn’t have my belongings and I was living out of a suitcase.  My mom was fucking my uncle and they weren’t quiet.  There was a lot of drinking.  My uncle kept his screwdrivers premixed in the fridge and that is the first place I got drunk.  When I was seven or eight.  No one noticed or cared.  For every age and stage of my life there is this easily apparent level of fucked up, and then there is all the stuff that happened in private.

I’m not doing that though.  For all that I am obsessed with transgressive sex… my kids sure don’t know anything about it.  Our conversations about all things sexual have so far been limited to things like, “Don’t put your finger in your anus or your vagina if it is dirty.  Go wash your hands first.  You don’t want to stick dirt inside your body because it will get itchy and painful.  And wash your hands afterwards because bodies have germs in different places that are supposed to stay in that place and not get spread around to other body parts.”  That’s ok, Jack.

How did I learn to be this?  I’m weird, to be sure.  But despite the incessant words in my brain, I’m not bad.  Not really.  I like to play at being bad.  I like doing things that are bad for some people or are bad in some ways.  But I always skirt a line.  I flagellate myself horribly if I feel I have gone too far over the line.  I kind of feel like hypervigilance is kind of the antithesis of being comfortable with your choices and uhm… I’d like to stop feeling it.  I want to be just comfortable in my skin.  That means accepting that some people are always going to dislike me.  I honestly feel like a lot of it is just because I smell funny.  I smell like not-them.  It’s not an actual odor, mind.  It’s a feeling that I am not part of their tribe.  That is the best way I can explain it.

anger sucks

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The things I didn’t mention about my family structure before the divorce were the vices.  Apparently my dad loved to take long baths and read books.  I’ve always felt very ashamed that I had anything in common with me because my mother made it very clear that having anything in common with him was shameful.  She didn’t seem to care about the vices she shared.

At one point my mother explained to me that she didn’t believe that drugs taken while pregnant were all that big of a deal, look at her kids.  With Denise she neither smoked, nor drank, and at that point she had never been exposed to anything harder.  Denise is a heavy alcoholic and drug addict.  With J she smoked cigarettes and occasional drinks.  J is both an alcoholic and a drug addict but I get the impression he is pretty controlled with it these days.  With Tommy she smoked a lot of pot, lots of drinking, and constant smoking.  He started doing tequila shots when he was 3.  They thought it was funny.  He was probably hit by a car because he was so high he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing.  For my pregnancy?  Take the above list and add speed.  I barely drink because alcohol makes my stomach cramp and I have horrible diarrhea for days if I have more than two glasses.  I occasionally do recreational drugs. (uhhh… breastfeeding and recreational drugs don’t mix.  Neither does pregnancy and recreational drugs.  I have standards.)  But oh man do I smoke a lot of pot these days.  I find out tomorrow if I get into the PTSD study.  If I do, I have to go off the pot.

I’m very excited.  I am not enjoying smoking and I’m really not enjoying that when I go out to run I have coughing fits and they very nearly lead to puking on my neighbors lawn.  That would be pretty humiliating.  Right.  Need to find other ways of managing panic attacks.  Pot needs to go.  I hate that I have to deal with it.  I feel like smoking pot makes me like my family.  I don’t want to be like my family. My sister and brother both smoke pot so they can be nice people.  That is their line.  That is my current line.  I don’t want to be like them. I don’t want to have drug use in common with my family.  I don’t want to need a drug to function.  I hate this.  I don’t really think that pot is inferior to any pill I could be taking in its place.  I don’t want to need drugs to function.  I want to get off my ass and get it done.

Panic attacks are one of the very few things in life where working harder is one of the stupidest things you can do.  I feel unsafe.  I feel like I am careening out of control.  The important word here is control.  If I really analyze the situations that are sending me off the deep end… this is all about control.  Ok, all is a strong word.

When I was 12ish, we were living up in Redwood Estates.  I came bounding down the stairs in my energetic way and I spun around the corner quickly and almost ran right into Aunt Vonnie.  I screamed loud enough to rattle the sliding glass door and I flung myself backwards about three feet and landed on my ass.  She laughed for about five minutes.  I cried and shook.  I’ve always had a strong startle reflex.  When people appear “suddenly” in front of me I have a really strong fight or flight reflex.  And I’ll tell you that I trained myself out of flight.  At this point in my life when I feel that way I want to fight.  It takes a pretty enormous amount of self control for me to not hit or swing or shove all my body weight into someone.  It’s completely instinctive and I have the sensation in my body of tensing all of my muscles in preparation for physical contact.

I’m 30 now, so I’ve been in this body a while.  I’ve learned tricks.  I can surge forward and stop myself quickly enough to not hurt people anymore.  I couldn’t stop myself years ago when I was trying to learn this.  But I probably look pretty scary by the look Sarah keeps wearing. That makes me feel really bad.  I don’t want to trigger her either.  She had a mother with anger issues.  Noah had a mother with anger issues.

I don’t want to be the next in a long line of mothers with major anger issues.  I don’t want my children to be afraid of me.

Being a pleaser

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As I sit here alone in my thoughts.  I realize… I don’t think I’m clear on who I am.  One of my problems is that I am ok with any ‘x’ part of myself as long as it is the part that is ok given my current relationship, and I don’t even just mean romantic relationships.  Whoever I am talking to defines my current behavioral approach.  My neighbors only meet one side of me, know what I mean?  Because even when I leave the house in latex, I dodge the questions.  I had this huge long thing in my head while I was nursing Calli to sleep.  Let’s see if I can recreate it.

I came into the bdsm scene when I was 18.  It’s only now that I am understanding exactly how self absorbed I am and I am shocked and horrified by the crap people put up with.  My friends were very tolerant.  Anyway.  I came into the scene and immediately hooked up with one particular group of people.  We went to the munch together every Wednesday and on the second Saturday there was a play party.  Yes, you all know who you are.  We were a very tight knit community.  There was a lot of hanging out together on other nights of the week as well.  I was absolutely brought into a set bdsm “community” and enculturated.  That sounds pretentious.  I only think of it as a culture now that I am completely outside of it and I can examine how I changed my behavior because of it.

I started dating Tom three weeks before I turned 19.  He changed everything.  It didn’t have to be him, but it was.  In my head we had more than one relationship and I never learned to reconcile them.  I was never comfortable.  I took that out on him.  Before I say anything else, our relationship was consensual from start to finish.  He never did anything to me that broke relationship agreements.  Our relationship agreements were non-standard.  For two of the four years we dated (lived together for the last three and some) in the middle we had a 24/7 Master/slave relationship.  What that meant to us changed a lot over time.

Tom was 30 when I met him.  He had been in the scene for ten years.  Now that I look around and think about taking on a protégé I have a lot of different thoughts about him.  He followed the camp site rule but he was a heavy player.  I’m not sure that was really and truly what I should have been doing.  Now I know why Femme Car condescendingly told me that she didn’t think anyone should be in the scene at 18/19 and they should go have regular sex first.

I’m not very good at regular sex.  I’m not very good at allowing people to touch me gently.  I feel bored by gentle touching largely because I am so dissociated from my body that it takes a nasty whallop for me to notice.  I also prefer for my sex to be fast with very little foreplay.  It’s not really all that intimate of an act.  It’s about getting off.  I do it with such gusto and vigor that folks tend to feel positively about the experience.  I guess.  I don’t know.  But bdsm gave me a way to learn how to touch people.  It gave me a way to have physical connection with another body.  Tom doesn’t have sex when he plays much.  They are totally different.  It’s not that he can’t but at least at that time, they were different animals.  Most of the people he played with were not lovers.

I could play with Tom and get my needs for physical contact met without having to deal with the pain of sex.  I am hemming and hawing about saying this because it feels like an invasion of his privacy but I explicitly asked for permission.  He said he is ok with anything I write about him.  I think that is the thing he gave me, both then and now, that prove beyond a doubt to me how much he loves me.  He lived me with me long enough to know how I write.  He’s ok with the possibility of feeling public humiliation or condemnation because of things he did.  He is ok with who he is.  He knows that he never crossed any lines.  And he trusts me to talk about the things we did.  My Daddy still loves me.  Ok, end of digression.

I didn’t understand for years that we had a basic mismatch of sexual desire.  I naturally default to wanting sex 4-15 times a week.  I like sex a lot.  Thus a lot of the quick and dirty.  When you are having sex that much, it’s about the continual short burst you get from orgasm, not from the long-lingering looks you get during foreplay.  Tom… well… he masturbates every day.  That’s part of getting up.  Which always confused me, but hey.  For the first year we probably had sex 2-4 times a week.  Then it dropped to once a week.  Then I finally relented on condoms.  We had sex with condoms for years because he refused to get an STD test.  I finally decided that he would be my life partner and relented and bam, I had HPV.  He told me, “Oh yeah.  I guess I never told you I had a wart.”  When he told me that I was rocking on the bed sobbing about how I am dirty and I brought this home to him.  You see, this virus can live in your body for years and I thought I must have caught it from one of the people who raped me.

We had very different relationships.  We never learned how to communicate with one another.  He could not volunteer information and I did not know the right questions to ask.  At this point in my life I am capable of managing much more complex negotiations because of what I learned.  The HPV killed our M/s relationship slowly and then quickly.  I began acting out and he refused to punish me because he felt guilty.  From this comfy chair I project that me freaking out the way I did was fairly traumatic for him.  I began a quick descent into depression.  He didn’t know how to pull me out of it.  He told our therapist that he didn’t want to do M/s with me any more because it was too much work.  Which I interpreted as, “Holy shit!  I wrote these contracts where I promised that if she did ‘x’ I would do ‘y’ but I was just kidding.  She was supposed to do ‘x’ without me ever having to notice again and it’s not fair that she’s trying to make me work.”  I had it on god damn paper that he agreed!  God!  Fucking!  Damnit!  I don’t think I ever trusted him again and I began baiting him.

But that’s another story.  I’m talking about the sex.  Or I was.  I’m going to talk about my list.  What was my actual introduction to sex.

I count AJ as my first sexual encounter.  That was the blow job when I was three.  I skip the rapes.

The next was Jasmine.  She was a kid in the canyon where my aunt and uncle lived.  She was a year or so younger than me.  We spent hours and hours and hours lying around licking each other.  That was most of what we did.  Some digital penetration, but mostly that heavenly licking.  Ok, sometimes we would lie face to face with our thighs between one another.  I was… five, six, seven, eight?  I didn’t live there all the time.  We were both outcasts at Lakeside.  Last I heard she ran away from home when she was 13 to be a prostitute in Santa Cruz to support her drug habit.

Oh god.  I can’t do the full list.  It’s making my body shake.  I’m getting really scared when I try to think about what consensual sex I had starting around eight.  Where did I live.  Hmmm.  Oh, well it’s probably because I don’t want to admit how much sex play there was with Michael.  If I skip my rapist then I’m a liar.  That’s the problem with telling the truth.  It tends to not make you look how you want to look.

I don’t remember any sex play other than Jasmine until we moved to Texas.  The trailer park in Texas was honestly one big orgy.  It was really fucked up.  There was a lot of incest.  There was a lot of blatant sexual abuse.  And parts of it I absolutely joined willingly.  Little kids growing up in that atmosphere re-enact what they are experiencing.  It is part of life.  I feel it as a jolt every time Shanna yells “Stop it!”  Every time she yells that at me I feel this pang of horror because it reminds me of re-enacting my sexual abuse over and over and over with all those little kids.  Because I did.  I don’t know how to count that as part of my list.  I never have.  I feel very confused by it.  This is where I have issues with sex positive culture.

I want my kids to only have their early experience to sex be that some day when you are a grown up you will like someone soooooooooo much that you want to do that with them.  It will be a special and private thing.  It’s kind of weird and physically awkward but some day you will be so interested that you will be willing to be brave and talk about it so that you can figure out how to do it in a way that feels good.  Because if it isn’t feeling good then you shouldn’t be doing it.  You should stop and talk about how to make it feel good.  Really.  You deserve that.

I don’t have that.  Not really.  And I want her to.  And I want to learn how to have that.  I’m not topping from the bottom.  I am trying to allow my poor battered body some fucking rest.  I want to be allowed to feel good.  I’m tired of trying to be the heavy bottom so that I can be appealing.  That was what I was enculturated with in that little circle of bdsm people I talked about up there.  I do have a point tonight.  Hopefully I’ll get to it.

Starting when I was 18 years old I joined a little intense subgroup that focused on bondage, heavy pain, and D/s.  There was very little mention of sex.  Almost none of it happened at our “sex” parties.  And Tom and I weren’t having much of it off stage despite the fact that I have a really high libido and want really frequent intercourse.  I had to get my touch needs met in other ways.  I tried really hard to sublimate them into Tom’s needs.  (Want to know what is fucking awesome?  I came up with the word sublimate instinctually but then I second guessed myself and looked it up to make sure I am right.  That’s what reading does for you, folks.)  I wore those fucking high heels and suffered for him even when he wasn’t home.  I sat around our house tying myself up and masturbating while covering myself in clothespins.  I was going fucking insane from not fucking.  He never asked me to be monogamous.  I don’t think he wanted me to be monogamous because I bugged him constantly.  But it made him hot that I was denying myself something that I wanted that much.

Oh, and early on we learned a hypnosis party trick where you can train muscle response with hypnotic suggestion.  Have you caught on yet?  He taught me to orgasm on command.  I had an involuntary muscle spasm on his order.  He thought that was great.  Eventually I had to ask permission to orgasm.  At one point I was allowed, even encouraged, to masturbate all day but I wasn’t allowed to come without his permission.  And it really wouldn’t have been ok for me to call him all day.  Sometimes he would be nice and give me permission for more than one.  It was an odd dynamic.  Chastity play was something we did.  Yeah.  It was hot and I was engaging in such a constant amount of sexual stimulation that I really could orgasm that easily.  I needed the freaking release.

But actual intercourse became increasingly rare and increasingly painful.  Why does one always leap to animal metaphors when trying to describe a penis?  Ahem.  Tom has the cock of a porn star.  He liked to repeat the line, “You know how there are growers and showers?  One time this girl was getting ready to go down on me and she said, ‘Oh… you’re a shower, huh?’ and I said ‘What are you talking about?!'”  Hyuck hyuck.  But it was accurate.  Flaccid he is noticeably larger than a lot of men I have slept with have been while erect.  I have not missed his cock.  I’m kind of the anti-size queen.  Noah’s cock is just about dead average and I wouldn’t mind if it was smaller.  Thank god.  You all wanted to know that.

But it actually is part of the picture.  Tom was probably something like #32 on my body count list and you can see that it is a pretty generous list.  I was seeing adult penises regularly starting from when I was seven and living in that trailer park.  At 18 years old I knew I wanted intense sex all the time.  And I picked Tom.  In some ways it was a really good thing.  I did a lot of bdsm play in a very short period of time.  A lot of it alone in a room, which is about as safe as it can get.  I would really like to find out what foreplay is like.  I have trained myself out of it.  This is a digression again.

I didn’t know how to get my needs met in that relationship.  When I was his slave I tried to get my physical needs met through bdsm play because he sure as shit wasn’t fucking me.  When he withdrew emotionally because he felt guilty for giving me a disease that involved scarring part of my cervix… which might have caused problems with the children I was so intent on having… I acted out and broke our M/s contract.  I didn’t feel I had other avenues available to me for getting the attention I needed.  Asking wasn’t working.  He was at his job constantly.  When he ignored me breaking the rules of our M/s contract I became a hellcat.  I was nasty to him and I started acting out in fairly public ways.  He didn’t want to have to control me.  When we stopped doing M/s we morphed into a Daddy/little girl relationship and that actually did a lot to heal how we had treated each other.

The problem is that when you grow into being Daddy/little girl… some day the little girl has to grow up and be a partner.  We couldn’t do that together.  He didn’t want to be responsible for carrying me as a burden and I don’t blame him.  He could never commit to being there for me.  It was too much work for me and a for better, for worse relationship really has to have enough of a balance to be worthwhile.  Tom never decided that my better was worth my worse.  Sometimes that is hard to live with because I worked so hard at that relationship.  I made that relationship a goal and I feel like I failed at reaching the goal.  That’s kind of a funny thing to realize.  That’s what I did.  I think I knew more of Tom than anyone ever had before I met him.  That might be hubris, but I doubt it.  I like to poke into people and we spent a lot of time alone.  He’s a good man.  He really is.  But he didn’t want me enough.

I chased him till I was done and then I left.  I left quickly and abruptly despite us having negotiated this long-term I could still live with him while I worked on school thing.  I couldn’t be in his house.  It hurt too much all the time to have it rubbed in my face that I wasn’t good enough for him.  It was the whole white trash thing.  I couldn’t fit in with his older, settled, more educated friends.  Or so I thought.  It took a lot of years for me to be ok with the kind of friendships I have now with his friends.  It’s a totally different relationship now.  They are people I used to know.  I care about them and they periodically reach out to me in ways that make me believe they care about me.  But life is busy and the monkey sphere is only so large.  I don’t fit in their culture and I rarely visit.  They consciously and specifically rejected mine.  It’s not a judgement.  They just didn’t want it.

It’s not even that, really.  I never learned how to integrate my sex community friends because I have never mastered how to navigate my different conversational/behavioral quirks and pitfalls.  I have a rather lot of them you see.  When I think of mixing the stream of people I know from different communities I have an adrenaline shot so intense that I start to hyperventilate and I get very angry because that is a really lot of energy for me.  Trying to stay present and focused in a conversation when I feel like I am supposed to be shifting my affect back and forth drains me and makes me feel like a deceptive and disgusting person.  I feel like I don’t know how to just be in the room.  I am supposed to be performing for the room and I don’t know what role I am in so I am reading two scripts at once and I start to panic because that means I am going to fail and then I feel abject terror because oh my fucking god here is more proof that I am a fucked up piece of shit I can’t even interact with two people at once oh my god I hate me so much and then I am angry.  I’m sorry for the run-on.  Once I hit that point of feeling angry with myself I instantly feel my face flush and I feel the need to start yelling at whoever is nearest to me.

Yesterday was a hard day.  And yes, it is all connected to the relationship that started when I was 18 and it’s all connected to that orgiastic trailer park.  I’m pretty sure I’ve never fully explained the extent of what I did in that trailer park, not even to Noah.  It was remarkably kinky.  In packs of children.  Oh what did we do.  Lots and lots of glorious oral sex on everyone.  Mostly this was a bunch of little girls ranging in age from 4-ish on to about 12.  Boys were around occasionally and when they were it tended to look just like a harem scene from a bad romance novel.  We competed to learn technique.  We knew what we were supposed to be doing.  It didn’t matter if we felt awkward.  It didn’t matter if we felt gross or bad or uncomfortable.

Most of it felt like shit.  I don’t count any of those kids on my list.  I felt degraded and nasty.  Most of them were dirty and smelled.  They had terrible hygiene and it grossed me out to perform oral sex on them.  Have I ever mentioned that Tom did not see a dentist during our relationship and he only brushed his teeth a handful of times when I specifically asked him to because the smell was bothering me so much?  We didn’t kiss.  I felt repelled by being too close to his face.  This is probably a big factor in our lack of intimate sex.  I didn’t want to face him.

Part of our M/s relationship centered around me doing his hygiene for him.  No really.  I bathed him.  I shaved him.  I cut his hair.  I trimmed his finger and toe nails.  I dressed him.  I shined and polished his shoes and boots.  Really the whole personal valet thing.  I picked someone with remarkably bad hygiene and made it my job to keep him decent enough for me to have sex with.  That’s really pretty fucked up, yo.  When I trailed off on doing the hygiene I expected him to just keep it up.  He didn’t.  I wasn’t very nice about his descent into being a slovenly disgusting… I don’t know… geek?  Who the hell did I think I was dating?  And then we look at Noah.  Ha.  I’ve given up on trying to clean him up.  I try to just not notice anymore.  I do pester him to get hair cuts because I think he should be looking vaguely more professional.  That’s it.  It’s kind of weird to not have control over his bodily functions.

It was this really weird enmeshed thing.  I truly had control over Tom’s body in ways that adults don’t normally have control over other people… and yet I wasn’t in control.  It was weird.  Now as a 30 year old who has been married for five years I understand some of the bdsm we did.  I can see how doing some of those things with Noah would build intimacy if done as a one time special occasion thing.  Or even as something it is ok to ask for once in a while. But it was my job with Tom.  It was my job to care for his physical body the same way I now care for my children.  It was a fucking pain in the ass.  But it was intimate.

A kind of weird false intimacy.  One emotionally distant pillar of the community asshole told me, “It’s good that he got you young.  This way you can be trained right.”  All the older people chuckled.  I got so angry I wanted to beat the ever-loving-shit out of all of them.  I felt completely enraged.  I wasn’t very interested in being trained.  I was interested in being appreciated for the things I did and acknowledged for the ways I behaved naturally.  I enjoy caring for people.  Ok, periodically I go through these periods where I feel enraged by the pointlessness of my life… but that’s a different issue.  There has to be balance.

I like caring for people and I like teaching people to be self-sufficient so that if my care is withdrawn for some reason they are able to carry on as if I was never there.  I like to get things on a well ordered clock. This is why I normally retreat to a room alone and refuse to interact with anyone when I’m having rage issues.  My rage issues arise because I am all of a sudden confronted with how little control I have over the people around me.  Someone is standing in front of me with a stunned deer look.  I should say, “May I get by” if I want to get through an entry way.  Instead I glare in silence as frustration and anger build and then I stomp off on in a different direction.  It doesn’t matter who the person is.  I do this no matter who is here.  I swear to god it isn’t personal people.  I get just as angry with the refrigerator.  I feel so overwhelmingly powerless to control the stupid, small annoyances in my life.  I feel like I am required to submit to the whims of anyone who demands from me because… after all… I enjoy caring for people–right?  It has to be all or nothing, right?

Haven’t you ever noticed that the men show up for a dinner party and sit on the couch to chat while the women walk into the kitchen and ask to help?  That’s true in some cases but not for all.  There are awesome men who always offer to help.  They aren’t in the majority.  And even the ones who offer to ask will stop asking if they are told no a few times.  Women tend to continue to pester.  They know that I am a lying sack of shit when I say I have everything under control because they know they don’t either.  Every woman needs more help than she is getting but getting help is sometimes a lot more work than doing it yourself… so we say, “I’ve got everything under control!”  Have I mentioned how much Sarah has improved my life?  I fucking hate cooking.

That’s not even true.  I hate long-term monotonous tasks that have to be done according to other peoples schedules.  I’m fucking sick of having to feed my fucking kids eleventy billion times.  It’s fucking boring.  I have have prepared and fed probably 70% of Shanna’s meals at this point.  The percentage is dropping fast.  The only reason it is so low is because Noah has been cooking breakfast for a long time.  Shanna eats four-five meals a day.  And it’s not just snacking.  I can’t believe how much that child eats.

So my intimate life with Tom became about me caring for his hygiene and enduring as much pain as I possibly could while complaining as little as I could manage.  While still being entertaining for the people who were watching because he really only wanted to play when people were watching.  I was his slave, not his girlfriend.  We supposedly had a concurrent girlfriend/boyfriend relationship… kinda…  We certainly did some vanilla things together and had fun.  We traveled but I’m a shitty traveling companion.

I could both see and not see Tom.  It’s only now that I understand that I feel like it was a failure because I was trying to be prescriptive of our relationship rather than descriptive.  I couldn’t just be in a relationship with him.  I had to name it and write out a long document of how it would go and we both had to live up to it or it wasn’t a real relationship.  We failed at doing what we said we were going to do.  That’s hard to live with.  We tried so hard to grow past the end of our M/s but we couldn’t.  He wasn’t a good match for me as a partner.

That is a lot of why I put Noah on the pedestal I do.  I dated Noah through the last six months of my relationship with Tom.  He even spent the night and I slept between them.  I couldn’t do it.  I couldn’t deal with the increasing separation from Tom.  He didn’t want to marry me.  He didn’t want to have kids with me.  What did he want?  He wanted me to wear horribly uncomfortable shoes and allow him to cause me pain while I smile for the rest of my life.  Uhh, no thanks.

It’s actually kind of nice to think of it as a role I was auditioning for and I rejected it.  It wasn’t right for me and he didn’t think I was worth much without that.  Ouch.  I think that’s what I grieve.  For years he called me One.  Because I was that special.  He had finally found the right one.  I would have let him do anything to me to prove how devoted I was.  I could not come up with scenes that were dirty or painful enough or dangerous enough to quench the need I had to prove that I loved him.  Being there wasn’t enough.  I wanted him to constantly test me.  I demanded that he do so.  He got sick of it.  He’s a good guy.  He can only abuse his girlfriend so much before he wants to go do other things, you know?

If he could have handled switching to having sex all the time we could have had a chance.  But only having sex eleven times in the last year meant it was a no-go.  That’s ok.  Noah is awesome.


 I want to explain more about how that little bdsm group shaped me.  There was a gentle constant pressure to behave submissively.  We had a lot of puppy-pile bdsm and a fairly rigorous lack of switching at an event.  People were expected to be one way all the time, even if they switched elsewhere.  Or when Tom and I switched in public… it was always understood that I was his slave giving him physical sensations he wanted to experience because it was my job to please him.  An awful lot of it I didn’t enjoy.  It was my absolute responsibility to be gung-ho and do what he wanted and perform sexual enjoyment to fulfill his fantasies.  I’m not turned on by cross dressed men.  I’m just not.  I don’t think there is anything shameful about it.  I don’t think it’s bad.  I can think it is fun to put makeup on someone.  But seeing a man in a dress does not inspire me to have sex with that man.  Tom is actually quite into cross dressing and being “forced” to do things.

Even the sex that was available to me was sex I frankly wasn’t interested in.  It’s kind of remarkable the store of guilt I have for not enjoying more of our relationship.  I forced myself to stay in it and stay enthusiastic long after it was apparent we weren’t a match.  I learned to do that.  I was specifically taught that sex was something fairly unpleasant (hygiene, specific activities that hurt) but parts of it feel good and you are required to be available for it at all times with anyone who asks.  I’m very angry with myself for the amount of time I have been demanding that guys perform in a set specific way because that is how I trained myself to get off.  I refined it with Tom.  Because the way that I push people to treat me is often fairly unpleasant.  But I egged it on.  It was my initiation.

Why do I keep insisting on having sex that hurts me.  Maybe instead of looking for a medical assist on not tearing vaginally I should start with foreplay.  It sounds obvious, doesn’t it?  But it’s not really an option in my life right now.  If sex lasts longer than about ten minutes it becomes really painful because we don’t have a good place to have sex.  I want to get it over with too.  I think that Noah is kind of tired of my mixed messages that I am upset about not having foreplay but I push him really hard to just get it over with already because my body hurts.

I’m tired of having my body hurt.  I’m tired of being hurt.  I want to be touched gently and that means modeling it for my wild animal children.  It’s very hard that they hurt me all day long.  They don’t mean to.  It’s hard to control all those pointy little joints.  They love me so much that they want to cuddle me all day long and climb on me like monkeys.  Mt. Mommy is the best ever.  And I sit there and with every jab of an elbow, every kick, every knee dug into me… I’m tired of pretending to be happy while I am being hurt by people who love me.  So tired of it.

Then I hide and feel guilty.  Wanting to be away from my children feels like a sin.  Like I am abandoning them.  Like I am the thing that their whole fucking world is pinned on…  For most of my life my mother was the only consistent person.  I lived with her more than I lived with anyone else but I moved constantly and I wasn’t always with her.  I had to constantly adjust to new rules and new expectations of me.  If I didn’t perform appropriately, instantly, I was punished.  It was for my own good.  I had to learn.  I wanted so badly to learn and perform and be a good girl.

I really wish fewer of the lessons had been about sex.  I wish fewer of them had come from new neighbors.  When I would go over to play at the houses of my new friends in Texas I would wander by the bathroom door.  One of the step fathers spent a lot of time in there supposedly peeing while sitting down.  Most of the time he was masturbating and waiting for us to show up.  We helped.  He smelled really bad.  His hair was dark.  He probably shaved about once a week because he was pretty shaggy a lot of he time.  His breath was foul.  I remember him asking me, “Here, won’t you touch it?”

I wanted to vomit from the smell, but I stepped in and did it.  I don’t think it occurred to me until much later that I could have said no.  I was seven.  I didn’t believe I was allowed to say no when someone dropped their pants and told me to do something with what I found.  That step father only ever had us masturbate him with our hands.  He didn’t touch us.  It barely even counts, right?  I don’t consider him a rapist.  I don’t really consider myself his victim.  We were just fucking around, right?

If someone did that to my daughter I would castrate him.  I think that is why I need to have my lovers not interact with my children.  Noah has a good healthy respect for me and a bone deep understanding of me that frankly freaks me out.  I trust him because of this.  I do not trust the men I have transgressive relationships with.  I just don’t.  They’ve already proven that they have no respect for the rules of society, why exactly should I trust them around my kids?  They have proven to me only that they have a moral code that is transgressive… not that they have a moral code that aligns with me.  The only way to prove that you have a moral code that aligns with mine is to absolutely only behave in ways that you agree in advance to behave.  Tom didn’t do that.  Do I think Tom would hurt my kids?  Oh give me a fucking break, no.  Not in a million years.  I don’t think Tom has it in him to hurt a child.  Most perverts are actually pretty helpless people.  They are so petrified with guilt and shame for the things they want to do that they have to go construct this little other-life where they get to be their “real” self.  It’s not integrated into your whole person.

Unless you want to be really socially transgressive and rude about the fact that you like kinky sex.  You want everyone in the fucking coffee shop, including the five year olds, to hear about it.  No thanks.  I don’t want that in my life any more.  I need to start monitoring myself better.  I’m just as guilty about this as other people.  I take on that persona when I am out with that kind of group.  Now, I want to specifically say one thing.  It’s not about clothes.  I don’t care much about someone wearing clothes that are explicitly “adult” where children might see them.  That is something a parent is supposed to help their child learn to navigate.  I actually think that is healthy.  There is a range of human expression out there and kids have to learn to navigate it.

But I think that should be done much more slowly than other people do.  That’s ok.  As I’m dealing with the intensity of my feelings about this topic I realize that I will be fine with my kids “overhearing” those conversations in coffee shops once they hit 11, 12, 13… whenever they are obviously starting to have hormonal surges.  Because then we can talk about them and I can present my values.  I don’t want people out in the world to really change.  But I do want to be very very careful about who I bring around my kids when they are little.  I don’t want to be asked what porn is yet.  I love my friends, but I never associated with them in contexts where they watched their mouths.  So I don’t believe they can.

Most of this is because when I am around those friends I bring it up.  I am so desperate for adult conversations and flirting that I will take it any chance I can get it.  And then I feel like I am crossing lines.  And then I flagellate myself for days.

I hope I had a point somewhere.  It’s time to go have breakfast.