I’m having a party by myself.  It’s my first time off from the kids since my long shift up at the café.  I opened a bottle of champagne and I’m watching movies.  First 10 Things I Hate About You and now The City of Lost Children.  This is a fairly visual one, so my rate of typos may go up.  I’m sorry for that.  I know I will be too lazy to really edit.

Today has been an interesting day.  Emotionally.  I think it is influenced massively by the fact that I started my cycle today.  I’m still getting used to that.  The post-children body experience is quite different for me in ways I have trouble getting my head around.  The first time I bled after Calli I cried in the shower and played with the clots.  I said goodbye to the children I will never have.  I haven’t done that since but each time I bleed I feel increasingly like I am shutting the door on my biological desire to breed.  I don’t actually want more children.  My body does.  But I don’t.  I have to deal with my whole emotional experience there.  My body clearly wants more children.  It yearns for more.  If Noah’s vasectomy failed I would rejoice in the gift of another child.

That’s actually one of the things that I am really thrilled about with the cessation of nonmonogamy.  I don’t have to go pursue a back-up form of birth control.  I’m really ok with the idea that Noah and I are done but for the intervention of G-d and I haven’t actually decided against further children.  My body wants more.  I don’t mind at all that we won’t have more kids.  I wouldn’t want to clean up after them.

This is the weirdest forking movie on the planet.  But Noah likes it a lot.  I’m trying to understand more of what he likes about it.  It is incredibly creepy.  Everyone is a caricature of a person.  Often literally.  Weird mutants and clones abound.  Sadness and despair is the stuff of life, isn’t it?

I can’t write about this movie.  I can’t see me in it.  I suppose that is vain.  My horrors are different.  Not better, but different.

I am going to try today unmedicated and try to save what I have left. I’m nervous. But I got eight hours of sleep without a sleeping pill. The deck is as stacked for me as it can be.

I feel like a failure.  I feel like I have harmed my best friend.  It’s true.  I have.  I told Sarah that I can’t continue to live with this level of unreliability.  I don’t think there is any chance that I can get my anger under control while I do.  I really and truly cannot handle having to ask another adult to do their chores. I can’t.  I know that is a failing on my part.  I know I should be able to learn to communicate better.  There are some battles to improve I can win and there are some I am going to lose.  I will never be able to handle micromanaging someone else in my house.  I’m trying to do less and less of it with the kids.  I’m sure I’m failing, but they are quite young.  I have time to figure out how to do that as it is necessary.

I cannot unlearn a lifetime of bad habits fast enough to be a civil person for Sarah to live with.  It’s not fair to her to put up with my temper tantrums and nastiness.  She is doing the best she can and she’s

Being a parent challenges parts of me

We have all the furniture, kitchen gadgetry, and linens we could possibly need for many years.  Shanna and Calli are (I think) set in their next respective sizes.  I’m still shifting sizes dramatically and I will need to buy clothes.  I think I should limit it to no more than $25/month and only at thrift stores.  I started off 2011 wearing size 16.  Right now I am on the smallish size of a 12 and every sign of getting smaller as I increase running.  I will really and truly have to acquire new clothing.  I’ll try clothing swaps and such first.

We have to buy food of course.  I’m not going to ask us to commit to a year of not eating out.  Ew.  But Noah and Sarah–I think we should have a really low amount we are allowed to spend per week.  What do you think is fair?  Right now we generally squeak by with $400 when I’m trying to keep us from going out.  Do we have to stay at this level?

Groceries absolutely have to be under $1,000/month.  Just… yeah.  We eat too well.  What are our actual priorities?  Raw milk at $16/gallon?  Eggs from chickens who had a great life at $7/dozen?  Probably.  What else will we have to cut instead?

It’s probably not the best idea in the whole wide world but I think I will be on a hiatus for a while from therapy.  I don’t have it in me right now to go chase a new person.  I am going to save the money and maybe get other things done health wise with that much smaller budget.

Can I say that I’m getting fucking sick to death of how the word triggers is used.  Mostly I hear it mean: ‘So this person is crazy and reacting to ghosts… it’s not my problem that they are over-sensitive but I guess I can give a lame-ass “I’ll try to respect you ‘triggers'” line.’  Fuck you all.  No really.

I’m kind of tired of having people throw it in my face that they are trying to be “sensitive” to my “triggers”.  Bitch you don’t even know what the fuck that means.  By the way, I’m kind of angry.  Apparently having a trigger means that someone does the same asshole thing to you that someone else has already done.  Or at least caused you to think hard about the previous time and consider how you want to react this time.  People are so dismissive of “triggers” because it is a good way of saying, “You were already hurt here so it’s not my fault you are hurting now.”

Actually, an asshole act is an asshole act.  Lying is lying.  When you negotiate extensively for activity A and you instead engage in activity B… that’s not a miscommunication and that’s not about me being triggered.

You want to know the “trigger” part?  My gut-level response to this behavior is to go sleep in a different bed and cry and assume there is nothing in the world that will change it.  Because that kind of lying is something that people just do.  I should stop listening to what people tell me.  There isn’t a point.

Things that were effective coping mechanisms during your childhood are hard to abandon as an adult.  When someone lies to me, I have to withdraw trust.  Fast.  I have to shut down affection towards that person.  I have to stop being vulnerable because if they smell blood… I’m dead.

I suppose that triggering me means acting like my family.  So that I have to act like I do with my family.  It’s not about a set word or phrase or experience.  If you act like my family… I have nothing for you.

My family would set terms on who you can know.  If you had the audacity to want to be friends with someone they didn’t like… well… that’s going to result in nastiness, name calling, threats of abandonment (that aren’t followed up on because the piece of shit bully is dependent on having you around to kick), and of course threats of suicide.

Wow.  That all sounds like what I say and do when I tell Noah that I don’t like him dating.  Ironic.  No wonder I feel like I shouldn’t be saying no, no matter what.  Because I have this gut reaction of not wanting to be like them.  It’s bad to say, “Actually this behavior is toxic to our marriage for ‘x, y, and z reasons.'”  Because then I’m trying to control him inappropriately.  My adult spin on not wanting to be this person is to think that I should start shutting my mouth and putting my head down.

My family would rewrite history.  Oh, it’s not that anyone lied.  We just miscommunicated, that’s all.  No one ever has to be accountable for their actions.  That’s why I have a scorched earth policy.  Someone who is going to lie to my face and then go behind my back and do something else all the while maintaining a dialogue with someone else that perpetuates a lie… wow.  I need to run, not walk away from that.  You want to know what a trigger is?

It’s the sure knowledge that a liar is poison.  Someone who will lie to me… I can’t know.  I can’t be vulnerable with.  I can’t pay attention to them.  I can’t worry about what they want.  I know it will be a facade and I’ll never know them anyway.  As soon as you lie to me, and then tell someone else that we “miscommunicated” well…  Yeah.  Ok.  The solution to this “miscommunication” is for me to assume you are lying going forward.  Sounds great.

I lie too.  I lie compulsively sometimes.  I say things in the heat of an argument that aren’t true no matter how you look at them.  And I hate myself for it.  That makes me want to run too.  Because these topics are things that I can’t be honest about.  So I’d rather not discuss them.

At any other point in my life this kind of behavior would be cue for an abrupt turn on my heel and exiting the premises permanently.  I would much rather leave than try to fix something like this.  My life is complicated now.

I understand a lot of things differently as life goes by.  I think about why women stay in domestic violence situations.  I think about why my mother and my sister are the way they are.  Why do they lie compulsively all the time?  They were taught to.  That’s what hanging out with liars will do.  It teaches you to lie.

The problem with being married to a sociopath is I am never sure if his vision of enlightened self-interest lines up with mine.  My best-interest is considered to the extent that he wants to manipulate the correct behavior out of me, preferably while volunteering as little as possible.  Because the less he volunteers, the more control and power he has.  There are cracks in my Stockholm Syndrome.

It’s hard having such extreme opinions about Noah.  Mostly I feel better about/toward/with him than anyone else on the planet.  And then sometimes I don’t.

It was a different experience this time.  I wasn’t nervous.  I was there calmly, without anger.  I was there to show my children what it means to live in a country where free speech is protected.  We are allowed to march in protest.  Why do we march?  What does it accomplish?  Well, it’s weird.  This is hard to talk about.  This is what I am struggling to explain to my daughter.

The future is not a set place that we are racing to get to.  There are many events happening all over the place and no one has any idea where it is all headed.  If you don’t like the looks of where things are going, make some noise.  Change things.  People making their wishes known is the only thing that has ever made things change.  People have power.

This time I was not amongst the first 200 people to the port.  I was moving at the speed of three and a half. It’s a very different march at that speed.  You see the range of emotions so much differently.  At the General Strike I was in the front.  I was determined.  This time I watched the masses of people leave me behind.  It was an interesting perspective on how I feel a lot of the time.  I don’t belong with any of the groups.  I’m not part of them.  I used to just be alone, and always feeling like I was more and more out of touch.  Now I get to look down and squeeze Shanna’s hand and say, “I am so glad you are here with me.”

I think about why I am teaching my daughters to Occupy.  What am I doing, precisely?  I want them to feel like they get to take up space.  But it’s more than just that.  The only way you can change the world is if you go forth with absolute conviction and get other people to agree with you.  There is no room for wishy washy.

I have all these intense feelings about shutting down the port the second time.  I’ll be honest and say that I went because Boots Riley told me to.  If you haven’t listened to him speak, you should.  He’s going to change the world.  Passion like that is compelling.  He is more than just passionate though.  He is honest.    Honesty is pretty hard to come by in most places.