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Emotional dysregulation for the lose.

Today I am angry. I am so angry I want to punch holes in walls. I am sad. I am so sad that I want to crawl under my bed and stay there for days sobbing until I am completely dehydrated.

I can’t do either.

I feel bad. I feel bad about myself for being someone who has these emotions. I feel angry with myself for being so petty and pathetic and stupid and hateful. God I feel hateful. I don’t even know who I hate. But I hate someone–anyone–everyone.

I want to cut. I want to cut so much it hurts already.

Yesterday we had a really great party. The weather cooperated. Everyone had a good time. I feel like a fucking asshole because I made comments to people about things that are none of my fucking business.

Hell, last night friends called me wanting advice on labor/delivery stuff. That’s flattering. Obviously other people don’t think I am a piece of shit. I do.

Today it feels like there could be no possible reason that I should stay alive. I am obviously inadequate and pathetic and bad. I kind of understand that this is fleeting. That I don’t always feel this way. I feel like I have nothing to give. And I feel like that means there is no reason for me to be here.

When I was reading the book about survivors it struck me that part of the difference between female survivors and male survivors is they often (not always–of course) women have to put their heads down and shut up and accept an evil overlord sort of presence because that is the only way they can raise their children.

I absolutely believe that the usefulness of my life at this point rests in my ability to turn out progeny who will be better, faster, stronger, and smarter than me. I could have decided to turn my prodigious educational gifts on other peoples children but I am selfish. I know that in the fullness of time I will feel more satisfaction from being able to see the tangible result of my efforts in the form of adult children who are able to go out into life and be successful. I will take it personally if I teach them something else.

Does that mean that I think that all people need to be motivated in the ways I am motivated? No. This is my personal problem. This is my journey. I do not believe that anyone else needs to be on my journey.

I think I am alone. And I feel angry about it. I don’t want to be but I am. I can’t handle what it would take to have people more actively in my life. I can’t handle getting up every day and having to deal with other people. I can’t handle a co-op preschool. I can’t handle doing outings every day with the homeschool group.

I feel brittle and broken and stupid and mean. I feel impatient and nasty. I feel bad.

I know it’s not ok that I place such importance on my children. I’m supposed to care about other things. I don’t know what I should build on. I feel kind of ridiculously angry with myself for fucking up the tomato starts. Stupid stupid stupid mistake. Well, I won’t make it again. Fuck. I can’t particularly base any self esteem on that project this year. Shit. Shit. Shit.

I need to go weed. I’m supposed to let that be enough for today. I’m supposed to let/make the children play outside. I’m too angry to be patient. I’m not angry with them. I can’t stand real close to them right this minute. I radiate anger. It makes them feel upset. It’s not about them.

I’m supposed to be loving. I don’t feel loving. I feel like I am bad. I feel like I have nothing to give. I feel like a defective person who is incapable of loving anyone. I used up a lot of spoons yesterday and I still fucked up repeatedly. I’m really not good at saying the right things. I feel mean-spirited. I don’t mean to be.

This is where the Generalized Anxiety Disorder part kicks in.

I am not being mean to the kids but I am not up for cuddling today. They are feeling pretty upset about that. I have to live with them being upset sometimes. And they have to live with me being upset sometimes. I’m sorry for that. I know this is the downside of this home schooling business. I know that this is the reason folks thinks folks with mental illness shouldn’t be parents. These mood swings are ridiculous.

I told the kids I needed to go sit in the garage and watch a grown up movie. I need to have my break early in the day. I’m watching Double Jeopardy with Ashley Judd and Tommy Lee Jones. Why do people act the way they do? How do people develop their own different obsessions and needs?

I will take my kids out to play and I will make jokes and interact with them. I will snuggle on demand. I will weed and I will be thrilled if they join me and provide a bunch of alternatives so they don’t have to.

It doesn’t matter how I feel. It matters how I act.

It’s ok for me to say, “I’m tired. I put out a lot of energy yesterday and I’m being grumpy with you because of that. I’m sorry I’m snapping. I’m going to go watch a movie and try to relax. After that we will go play.” I put out a plate of snacks. I refilled the water bottles. They are just having the ipad in the morning instead of in the afternoon today. That’s fine.

It doesn’t matter how I feel. It matters how I act. I want to have a relationship with these people. That means I have to be the fucking grown up. I don’t really want to be. But I signed on for this gig. Only fifteen more years until I am off duty. fuuuuuuck.

I will figure out what I want to live for at the end of the term of duty. Until then–time to go be a good example. Or some shit like that.

anxiety purge

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Living with Noah has changed how I think about computers. I don’t think of them as magic anymore. I think about them as the result of a large set of mathematical equations. I’m getting closer and closer to being interested in thinking about that. Right now my brain is pretty full.

I’ve been thinking about what the gardening represents for me. It’s a combination of learning biology, which feels like an intimidating “science” thing for me, and learning how to do manual labor. I haven’t done this sort of physical movement much in my life. Uhm. It’s hard. I feel like a tremendous loser because it is so hard. A lot of the time I feel frustrated and scared because I don’t even know how I should begin. I feel like I am doing it all wrong. I lost two plants this year. Well, I wanted a place to put yellow roses any way. Noah’s mother sent me $75 as a congratulations for finishing my book. I want to buy yellow roses with that money. It will make me happy. It will make me think of her gratefully when I am outside of my house. It will give me a reason to think of her positively.

I’m not going to have a relationship with Noah’s mother. Not really. Noah totally has an Oedipal Complex because he went off and married his mother. When he talks about his childhood it sounds like something I could easily do if I didn’t deal with my mental health issues. It sounds like it is hard to be his mom. Being in her head must hurt. She feels a powerful fear all of the time. I can understand that. I can’t have a relationship with that. I have too much fear as well. Neither of us has the ability to make the connection.

The one time I went out to meet his family his mother spent three hours telling Noah how inappropriate I was. We were already married. I am poor white trash and his mama knows it. We will never have a relationship. I was out fucking every kid in the trailer park when I was young. They don’t like my kind where his family comes from. Really, what mother wants a girl like that for her son?

So his mother and I will never have a relationship. There is too much fear between us. Too much judgment. Too much crazy. We are both wounded animals. I don’t know what wounded her and I really can’t care. I’m too busy tending my own wounds. But I want to plant yellow roses in my yard and think of my mother in law in Texas sending me a very lovely gift.

I hate the color yellow. I have since I was a kid. I had a yellow dress and yellow earrings and a yellow headband and my mama told me, “Oh God. You’re just like your father. You like yellow. Ew. That’s his favorite color.” I have had a hard time with yellow since. Occasionally I get yellow clothing as hand-me-downs.

I stopped dressing in hand-me-downs when I had kids. No one gave me adult sized clothes any more. Now I buy them. It’s weird. I feel like I am supposed to develop “taste” and I don’t know what that even means. I still want to dress like Punky Brewster. I want to go shopping each time and buy something weird and colorful and end up just… not… owning neutrals. I’ll look weird. That will be ok.

But it isn’t. Because I’m ugly and my mama dresses me funny. I was told that over and over and over and over.

Today isn’t shaping up so good. I have a lot of insecurities. It’s hard to access them one at a time. They are all interconnected. Why am I so afraid of rejection? Why can’t I let that woman be part of the park group? Because I can’t be near someone who is going to send of pot shots. I just fucking can’t. I don’t want positive comments from an insincere person. I want to be invisible. I’m really not invisible. I don’t want to become invisible so that I avoid comments.

I know how to dress in ways that will not attract attention. I’ve been doing it for a while. I wasn’t ok with that whole “I can touch you because you are pregnant” thing. So I can dress in ways that don’t attract notice. Why should I have to? Because I don’t want people to comment on me. But I like it. Oh fuck.

I don’t want to have to think about how my actions are going to effect someone else. I want to just do what I like. When I know I am going to be around someone who is quite happy to be vicious and spiteful in my direction I am immediately hypervigilant and I have to think about every fucking aspect of this interaction from what I wear to what I say. I pick my kids clothes out. They are neutral and subdued. Gender neutral, even.

My kids pick their own clothes out 99% of the time. They are not remotely subdued or gender neutral. They both like dresses in neon shades of pink. I think it is hilarious given that Shanna didn’t have them when she was smaller. I only had boy hand me downs for a long time.

I always liked wearing bright colors. I’ve always liked the casual, easy, positive interactions I get with value neutral people in public when I dress the way I like. I don’t like comments from people I know. I don’t want to have to store up in my head that they said something nice to me now I am expected to return the favor and next time I should probably start the nice exchange and. No. Just no. I can’t. I have no fucking interest in getting on the manners bandwagon at this stage of my life. I have to stay here. My kids get to grow up in one place.

It is challenging to manage my emotional needs as my relationships get longer and longer. I have to not expect anything from people in order to continue to know them over time. It’s a very hard line for me. If we are doing an activity together and have no outside connection it is easy. I have no expectations of people I see at an event. They don’t owe me a smile or a conversation. Friends are hard for me.

It is hard having people visit my house. Part of the reason I stress about housework is because I want to have a house that is “company ready” all the time. Not for them, exactly. My friends don’t give a shit. I’ve seen their houses. When my house is “messy” it’s really not bad.

My friends are busy. They have shit to do. They hold down jobs. They have vibrant social lives. I uhhh hang out in my house with my kids. We do go places. But it goes in waves and it’s rarely for more than four or five hours. We are here a lot. If I leave the house messy then I have to live in that mess. I have to work and think in that mess. I find it horribly distracting. I don’t go to Noah’s job and pick up all the stuff on peoples’ desks and throw it in the air. That would make doing actual work hard.

So I sit here and think. What is my job here? To educate my children. Basically. What do I want to educate them in? I want them to have the ability to have any kind of life they want to have. That means they need to start off in a whole lot of directions at once. Sure, we can do frilly princess and makeup. Her best (girl) friend is always the prince. They think role is about personal preference not about gender identity. That’s fucking awesome. But I’m not trying to bring up a little gender queer so I can have street cred in those communities. I need to not be invested in any results.

I’m teaching the kids that your body has to be active if you want to engage in a lot of activities. I want us to go work on farms for a year. It would not be a kindness to bring the average kid around here to a rural farm where they don’t speak the language. We have to be ready. We have to think about this in advance. What will that mean for our bodies? We should probably find a way to actually get ready. Which means that step one is for me to learn a whole lot more about gardening. Which is intimidating.

If you hadn’t noticed I’m flooded with a lot of stress chemicals. Being in that state makes it harder to learn. This is a lot of how I live my life. But I really want to do this. I don’t want to fail. I want to be able to be a productive and useful person on a farm. It’s important to me. When people talk about their “roots” well, working on a farm is part of most of our roots. You may have to go back a bit, but really. People have to eat. Food has to be provided.

I didn’t think about it very much until I had kids. I didn’t think hard about where my food came from. When I look at their bodies I want to give them food that will help them grow up as strong as possible. I want them to be able to handle anything that life gives them. I won’t be able to protect them forever. I have to do what I can now.

I don’t understand how blasé other people seem to feel about parenting. When I talk about feeling insecure or doubting myself people quickly tell me they don’t feel insecure. They must be lying. I can’t be the only insecure person. Give me a break.

I talked about feeling kind of insecure about unschooling the kids. I’m going to spend a lot of time revisiting that concept. I’m going to think hard about what that means to me. “Back in the day” people raised their children to be just like them. Uhm. I don’t want to raise my kids to be just like me, thanks. I want my children to live with fear like I do. Bad things happen. Then you move on. Normal people don’t get caught in these loop tapes. Normal people have some normal to fall back on. Some sense of themselves that was formed during the long stretches of their lives without trauma. Depending on how you think about consensual bdsm I haven’t had a period of my life without traumatic events. Hell, even having my second kid almost killed me. Woo.

I live in stress chemicals. They are all I know. I’m trying very hard not to teach that. The problem is, living in stress chemicals makes it hard to learn. All I am doing with my life right now is helping my kids prepare for life.

So I was looking at the California Content Standards for grade K. If I’m going to prepare her for being part of this society part of that includes having a vaguely similar knowledge base with her peers so that if anything happens she can transition back into a schooling environment. Things happen. I could have to work some day. Within the next two years (because she isn’t old enough for kindergarten anyway) she has to learn hygiene and how to stand in line. She’s otherwise pretty much there on the kindergarten standards for my subject. She has letters, morphemes, basic introduction to syntax, grammar… Math she isn’t quite there yet on all of it. She’s halfway there with two years to go. Obviously I have not failed her horribly so far.

Part of my weird social anxiety is that I really like being a teacher. That feels good to me. I don’t like being didactic with peers so I feel like I have nothing to say. I don’t know how to have conversations among peers. I can be a student or a teacher. That was, really, the primary positive relationships I had. That was my “normal” period that could be good. I had a lot of teachers who liked me. I had a lot of teachers who hated me.

There is a feeling I have when teaching. I am allowed to have intense bonding conversations within that format. I know there is a time limit on it. I know that the exchange is limited to what we are doing. I have no further expectations.

I get into a lot of trouble when I have expectations of people. I have to keep them further out at arms length. I can’t handle being told “no”. So I just can’t ask. I think the intensity with which I feel this is somewhat higher than average but there is a constant component of it in my head. I have to keep in mind that I can’t ask people for things. If they freely want to give me something I can take it, but I can’t ask. It’s hard to ask people to come over for this reason. I wouldn’t want to insult something I have worked so hard for by having a messy house. I have no idea why I have picked this standard of measurement because I am otherwise a specifically crappy host.

I don’t want my house to broadcast my social class. I want people to be continually surprised when I talk about how bad it was. That means I am living right. In my head I can’t separate out the messy house from the overall neglect and abuse and poverty. In my experience my friends who have decidedly messy houses have issues with their mental health and/or control. That’s not a nasty statement. *wave hand in friendly way* Whether people want to admit it or not, your perceived social class has distinct influence on your life. I am a stay at home mom. If I didn’t clean my house that would have social class implications. There is still a very strong element of “What the hell do stay at home moms do anyway?”

The point here is to teach them to be functional adult. If you have your house so messy that you constantly have to buy new things to replace things you have lying around somewhere and you don’t have the money to really support this behavior then you aren’t functional. That’s broken. It’s not a huge broken in the scheme of things but it’s a behavior I specifically don’t want to model or teach. We don’t have the money to be callous with our things. We can’t just go out and replace things right now. I mean we have money in savings but we don’t have any spare money in our set budget. It is not a responsible or mature decision to be callous with our things. We don’t have extra any more.

When you live in a messy house you break things and lose things. Ask me how I know. I don’t want to teach that. I really don’t. That means modeling doing things differently and not being a preachy asshole about it.

Now I’m just ranting. Ugh. My stomach hurts. Time to go look for food.

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I don’t feel like I have a good grasp on normal. I’m a freak and I’m going to raise little freaks. I’m sorry for that only I’m not. My demographic doesn’t need to fade out of existence. We aren’t bad. We are just weird. On the internet when people bandy about numbers I have seen the figure 1 in 17 men are rapists. I usually see that put right next to the figure that 1 in 6 women/girls will be sexually assaulted.

You know at least one rapist. No matter who you are. No matter what you think you know. Unless you know fewer than twenty men, you probably know a rapist. How do you live with that? How do you account for that? Do you think you are safe? I never understand why other women have the hubris to feel safe. I hope that I am never raped again. I’m not going to put money on it. I understand that part of the human condition is the need to play power games and at some point I may have the misfortune to be in the room with someone more powerful than me. Or maybe I will be attacked while running some day. Who knows.

Short of staying in my house and never associating with anyone again, what choice do I have? I can do all of the little “avoid being raped” tricks that they pass around but in that last vital moment… really… there isn’t all that much I can do. Some day I will have to depend on the kindness of a man to not rape me. Really I will have to depend on it over and over.

Recently I was spending time with a good friend/former lover. He suggested Watercourse Way, which is a hot tub place. From the minute he suggested going there till when we left there was a part of my brain and body that was on high alert. I was really afraid he was going to push physical boundaries. He didn’t. He has proven to me before that when he’s told to not touch me he is likely to stay 12′ away from me so there is no muddy area. But I was taking a risk. A fairly big risk. He’s a big man and if he wanted to over power me it wouldn’t be hard. I’ve known him for twelve years. When I spend time with him I worry and I keep escape routes in my mind.

The guy who came over for dinner? I don’t worry about that kind of thing as much. When someone is going to be with me and my kids I’m far less worried about what they will try to pull. Shanna’s speech is prodigious. She speaks like a nine or ten year old. If someone came over and tried to do something sleazy with me and Shanna in the room I am very aware that we will be one anothers witnesses. It would be hard to over-power both of us at the same time and we could both speak to police later. Right there it becomes a less powerful situation for anyone. There is more than one person on my side. It’s interesting to me that other women don’t see their children as a resource in the same way.

Sexual assault primarily happens among people who know one another. Stranger assault is somewhat uncommon. Most of the reason for this, in my only-slightly-educated-opinion, is because rape is about power and it is very difficult to assess the power of a stranger. You pick victims you know because you know how to get past their boundaries. A guy I barely know isn’t going to push his luck to hard because he will come up against my massive social hostility. I do not appear weak on first blush. You have to get to know me a little before you see the chinks in my armor. From what I hear, on first blush I am often terrifying. I’m really not concerned about shy gamer geeks coming over for dinner.

Noah feels a little weird about the fact that I am still thinking about why nonmonogamy is a bad idea for me. He thinks we have made the monogamy decision, ok those reasons are done–move on. I don’t do that. Monogamy is going to be a behavioral choice for me. It’s not really a relationship choice. I need to stop picking up sleazy men. Some of my former lovers may read this. I love you dearly. You scare the shit out of me. I am far more afraid of my former lovers than I am random men I don’t know.

If someone I don’t know touches me physically in an even barely intimate way, say stroking my arm, I am extremely likely to haul off and hit them. I’m rather reactionary with such things. If someone starts touching me in a way I don’t like but I’m worried about preserving the relationship… I’m in trouble. Because there is a battle in my head between, “Do I mind this boundary incursion enough to risk fucking up my relationship?” Part of the problem with my anger issues is I don’t have softball defenses. If you put a toe over my boundary line I can’t drop a beanbag on the toe. I’m going to throw an anvil at your head. It’s hard to survive being in my inner circle. People don’t seem to make it much longer than a decade. I’m glad Jenny is in another country. Maybe she will manage to stay one of my intimate friends for life that way.

There are a lot of ways I am deeply broken. I don’t ask for help well. And I don’t defend minor boundary incursions well. I don’t ask for help until I am in serious trouble and I should have had help an hour or a week ago. For someone to waffle or hesitate or decide slowly what part of it they want to help with… I can’t stay and watch that. I laid bare my need to you and you didn’t say, “Oh let me help” fine. Fuck you. I’ll fucking figure it out by myself. That’s not very useful. And minor boundary incursions are ignored until there are a bunch of them and then I explode. Because I decided along the way that the relationship was more important than pointing out all those nit-picky things… and then by the time I build a list the relationship isn’t more important any more. I feel bad saying that. But it’s true. Avoiding saying it doesn’t make the situation better.

Near as I can tell a rather large percentage of “rape” is sex that is coerced and unwanted but the woman never says no or actively resists. We just shut up and take it. I wish that I had another word for sex I don’t want but I never said no to. I often or usually said no or resisted during many of the times I was raped. How wishy-washy can I be. I know that right now I don’t want to go through my list of rapes in my head but when I casually think, “Did I resist or say no?” I can think of multiple times I know I did. I’m only seeing a few though. And I’m tired and fuzzy headed and I don’t want to try and examine if that is close to the full list. That hurts my heart.

I have a lot of shame around my sexuality. I have a lot of shame around the fact that I have used fantasies of my father to fuel most of my masturbatory life for most of my life. I don’t do that any more. My orgasm response is nearly entirely gone. I can’t help but feel that I put a graduate-degree level of work into learning my body only to decide that everything I knew was bad and I shouldn’t have ever wanted it and I’m disgusting for having ever done any of it.

Learning to feel horrified by that part of me feels inextricably tied to being a parent. I am one of those loathsome people who shouldn’t be allowed near children. Oh my god. The idea that someone would allow a person from a sex community to meet their children is horrifying and disgusting. What about when the parents are from that sex community? Why do I have any morally superior ground? Because I dropped some crotch fruit? Oh give me a break. I am the youngest child in an incestuous family. It went on for generations. I do not believe that being a parent means you are more likely to be safe.

Do you know what I like the best about the sex community? The gossip. Your reputation will make you or break you. Having deviant sex requires finding deviant people who are willing to trust you. Folks like to talk. If you step out of line in the community, often word gets around. It’s not infallible. But it’s fairly effective. I depend on that network for a lot of my baseline assumptions about people. Like: should I let them in my house or not. Past that I tend to rely on the fact that I am twitchy and aggressive to get rid of most people. Only people who are willing to deal with me loudly and aggressively dealing with them come multiple times. It’s interesting to see how it shakes out.

But I’m not stupid. I am well aware that the danger isn’t in the first few times someone comes over. Who might pick me as a target? Lots of people. But going forward I have the hard and fast line in my head. I’m monogamous. It’s a behavior choice. It changes a lot of how I talk to people. When I am hunting people often mistake me wanting them. I’m a chick and breathing and willing to fuck anyone–that means them, right?

Lately I spend a lot of time examining my behavior choices. I don’t want to send mixed signals. How do I physically hold myself when I am hunting versus when I when I am not looking for prey? That kind of “being nice” is bad for me system wide because it fucks up my boundary defenses everywhere. I’m having a very hard time with keeping my boundaries so active with everyone else and not with Noah. It feels all or nothing for me. Either I don’t get to say no to sex, with anyone, or I’m just not interested. I think it is a lot more useful and productive for me to work through this than to try and deal with the issues around nonmonogamy.

I want to be with Noah for the rest of my life. Some day I will probably have to deal with him dying. I have some attachment issues. I’m worried about being flighty and scared and unable to commit. I’m worried about breaking us. Nonmonogamy brings a whole series of big rocks into our lives for us to throw ourselves against. Monogamy brings much smaller rocks.

The past few weeks since writing the book I have had some fairly frank conversations with myself about the level of trauma I went through. I understand more of why people say, “I don’t understand how you survived.” Because I did. Because I got back up every day and I kept moving. I don’t know how many of those I have left in me.

There is a song out on country radio right now, by Martina McBride. It’s about surviving cancer. I’m fairly terrified of the future. I’m well aware that life has no obligation to be kind. I need a partner. I know people tell me that I am strong enough to be alone if I need to. Yes, I suppose I could survive that. But I wouldn’t really live through it. Noah has the biggest piece of me of any one on this planet. It’s only going to grow by the year. I can’t do this and keep my awareness up for big rocks. Things will happen that are unavoidable. Things we can’t ignore. Things we have to deal with. They have to be things that I can completely and totally have the right to be surprised by. I can’t keep my expectations of life low enough for nonmonogamy. I can’t expect to be kicked that hard on a regular basis. I won’t be able to keep surviving.

It feels like a melodramatic asshole thing to say. Other people do just fine with the fact that their partner wants to give part of themself to someone else. I’m not as fine with that. Noah is a bonder. I only kind of am. I’m just fine with the scorched earth policy in life. There are always people still standing. There are always people standing because there will always be people who are genuinely innocents in this life. They haven’t done anything to me or anyone else. I try my hardest to be nice to them. They seem to be able to forgive me for a lot of temper.

My approach of scorching earth when someone has transgressed enough on a close relationship is problematic. A lot of the reason I blog the way I do is because I am releasing these words onto the open internet. I can’t really come back later and deny doing it, now can I? I need to have that accountability. I need to have it so that I can’t become a liar. I was pushed hard towards sociopathic behaviors. I don’t come close to being a sociopath, but I certainly know how to manipulate. I certainly know how to lie. I don’t want to. I want to tell the truth. I want to be consistent. If I make a record of my real and true beliefs I can’t end up being a liar, right?

I don’t know how to communicate about the small things in a useful way with most people. Luckily Noah seems to be able to handle the conversational equivalent of an anvil to the head. When I am upset with Noah I can write about it as much as I want and he doesn’t feel slighted. With other people I worry about discretion. I don’t know how to handle that. When I can’t write abou things I feel like I shouldn’t even be thinking them because they aren’t nice. Then in order to feel justified in defending my original boundaries I have to over-defend them. Because not am I dealing with whatever the original boundary is, but it was hard for me to buck myself up enough to say, “Hey! I deserve better.” Because I feel like someone treating me like shit is pretty normal and par for the course. It’s hard to believe otherwise.

And that leads neatly into something I’ve been observing in my social circle lately. Has anyone else noticed how many of the geek boys who grew up being taunted and abused have gone on to be nasty bullies? Some of the girls too, but I see a lot of the worst nastiness from guys. I don’t get out much so I don’t pretend my experiences are the only ones. I think about it because I know that by the time I try to defend my boundaries I sound and look a lot like a bully. I’m trying to figure out how I want to deal with that.

Being a parent is teaching me who I want to be. Shanna’s facial expressions lately are always angry. She’s patterning off of me. I don’t get to decide who she becomes. But I get to decide who she has to put up with today. I want my children to remember a stable, happy life. I want my kids to remember parents who were enthusiastic about life–not people who put their head down to sludge through the misery. I don’t want to show my kids that I am strong enough to survive any misery dumped on me. I want to show my kids how to change your life so that you have fewer problems. That means making different choices. That means learning how to say that something isn’t working for me without having to scorch earth.

Parenting is really complicated. I’m having a hard time being the person I think I should be. Given the people I know and how they parent I don’t think anyone else has it easier. My mother did her best for me. It wasn’t good enough. I am trying to figure out what my best would be for my kids. I don’t have the assumption that I can muddle through and whatever I do will be good enough. I know that the economists tell me it is. But I can’t. I have to have to actually change in order to be my best. Otherwise I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know how I will pass the cycles on. The children of Adult Children of Alcoholics act like they grew up with a drinker in the house. It’s about behavior patterns. I don’t want to recreate the family that I had.

Who do I want to be when I grow up? Well, I will be someone who invites people from sex communities over to my house for dinner. Because I know how to keep the conversation G rated. People who have sex are regular people too. I do a lot of gardening. It’s getting to the point where I am starting the beginnings of plans that are going to take me twenty years to finish. I guess this is my forever house. It’s a good thing it will be paid off in ten or so years. Some day it will have more light.

Who do I want to be when I grow up? I think that deserves ten minutes of writing on its own. I want to be the gentled version of me. I want to be someone who feels safe. I want to be someone who experiences joy in my body. I want to feel like I am a decent person to know, even if you met me at a sex party. I want to feel like I am not a dirty little secret. I want to be someone who is allowed to be complicated because there is far more good than bad. I want to be someone who has a company-ready house every day. I like making last minute plans with people and I have a lot of shame issues around house cleaning stuff. I keep my house neat-enough. Lots of people see it covered in toys and I barely shrug. But I did mop and vacuum that day so it was perfectly neat at some point. I clean a lot. I think that is going to be part of who I am as a grown up. I like things to be shiny and I need to just put that into my morning routine as something I do for me.

Oh that’s pathetic. Who do I want to be when I grow up? I know I would like to talk about sex stuff again. I don’t know in what capacity. SFSI already turned me down. I’m not very good at round table discussions.

I will always be a person who likes to teach and who likes working with groups of people who are learning. I don’t know what shape that will take when I grow up. When I grow up I will feel a lot more comfortable with living in the town I live in. I will have been here longer than anywhere else. I am training for a marathon here. I am learning these streets intimately. I am meeting my neighbors. I will be a person who knows a lot of people here. I’m going to be that crazy lady down the street with the weird yard. The one who used to dye her hair funny colors but then she shaved it. They do recognize me and take double takes. It’s pretty funny.

When I grow up I won’t seem weird. I’ll just seem like Krissy. I will be comfortable in my skin and I will make people near me feel comfortable in their skin. Because it’s just as ok for them to be them as for me to be me. Yeah, I’m not much like other people. But that’s not actually weird. Once you know me it makes sense that I am how I am. It works really well for me.

That’s who I will be when I grow up. I will have fucked up over and over and changed as a result. I will learn how to actually live instead of just surviving. That is who I want to be when I grow up. I want to be someone who travels and meets people and has stories to tell. I don’t want to be overwhelmed by how hard it is just to do the basics to survive. I want to thrive. I want to know that I have extra energy lying around for random people phoning and telling me they have to drive past my house, can they stop for dinner.

I want to be someone who lives. I want to be someone who loves. I want to be someone who is safe and knows it. I want to know that if some day I am raped again in a chance encounter it will be something that does not make me want to jump off a bridge. I want to be someone who is actually attached to the people standing near me and they can actually give me support. That is going to be a big change. I don’t think I can be alone with such things any more.

I think that’s the line. I’m strong enough to just survive and put my head down and get through everything that happens to me, no matter what. I am a dumb animal and I have a strong will to live. But I can’t do that and really live. I will be so bitter. So angry. The hurting has to stop in order for this to change. I know that happiness is a state of mind and not a circumstance. I know. I know I could just change it. But I don’t know that I can by myself. It’s too hard. I need to stop hitting rocks for a while. I can’t change my response pattern if I am constantly in flux. It’s too hard for me. I’m sorry.

Mostly parenting babbling

2 Replies

I’m trying something different this morning, my wonderful daughter Shanna is cuddled up next to me on the couch watching Fraggle Rock. I’m going to see if I can usefully write with her in the room. I’m not sure. I feel very self-conscious about how often I cry in the process of writing. Often I’m sobbing the whole time. I’m kind of weird about crying around my kids. I do it sometimes, but I go to great lengths to avoid it because I feel so terrible about my moodiness. I wish I could manage consistency. I think the only baseline I could have would be anger.

That is what I am having so much trouble with. I feel guilty that I will never be able to be a placid, mellow, just happy mom. That’s not an option this lifetime. I am often happy. I am sometimes mellow. But I am also quick to anger. My anger burns hot. I get very sad. I may be one of the only women I know who isn’t bothered by the term “hysterical”. Even though I know it has nothing to do with my uterus, I really do get a kind of freaked out that men don’t get. At least not in places I can see. Sometimes it seems like I am the example of what is wrong with women. I should try to be more stable. More like the men in my life and all. Because the women in my life are more stable than me, but not by much. I’m sure that’s not a nice thing to say.

I’ve been really enjoying reading Austen novels lately. That’s funny because I avoided them like the plague when I was in college for that English degree. I’m enjoying seeing how very slow their lives are. It feels like it is giving me permission to strive for less. If I want to be a developed and accomplished person I need to have a lot of time spent in my house just improving myself. If I am running around with too many things I am obliged to get done in a day I will spin my wheels in place and not improve much. I’ll be too angry and frustrated to get the lessons from things I want to get.

Writing with Shanna here is different. I’m being vague and that’s funny because she can’t read yet. I’m not trying to spare her. If I want Shanna to grow up reading I need to read in front of her. If I want her to grow up being curious and interested in everything she can reach her hands out and touch I have to be free to walk with her and talk about the things she sees. I have to be non-distracted enough to focus on her questions. If I’m busy then I snap at her to leave me alone. I don’t want that to be our relationship.

I want my daughter to be one of the blessed few. I’m not striving for a “normal” childhood. I don’t think I could create one if I wanted. But she will grow up in this cocoon of love and acceptance and constant education. That’s why I am drawn to Unschooling. We really do sit and talk about things happening all day long. I’m learning how much I know as I talk to her. I know a great deal more about biology than I would have guessed. I am thinking about getting a few books so I can learn more.

Now I am in the garage. Calli called for me after that last paragraph and I spent an hour nursing and cuddling. I got to sit and think about how weird and defensive I feel right now. I’m often not sure what I am writing about until I am done. Randomly: last night I was thanked for writing the post about admiring women. I was weird and awkward and I almost cried. But I didn’t. Self control! I have it!

I don’t think I know how to be a mother, exactly. I’m not sure I know what that means. But I do know how to talk to my children as if they are humans-in-progress and someday, not that long from now, they will know everything I know and more. I tell Shanna every day that my job is to teach her everything I can so that she can be any kind of grown up she wants, regardless of my preferences. I talk to her constantly about how different people have different things they like and she gets to decide how much she will agree with my opinions. I feel weird about how often she wants to be like me. It feels like a lot of pressure for me to think hard about why I have the opinions I have. I don’t want her to have opinions based on my ignorance and bigotry. I don’t want her to become an angry person because I am angry.

I feel like there is a certain level of anger that is normal and occasional and everyone gets to have. I have no idea what that line is because I am often derided for any show of anger about any subject. There doesn’t seem to be a consistent scale. Or, whatever the scale is, it is also combined with the rule “And you are never to express any anger where any one else can hear you.” I missed the rule if it exists.

I often feel like it is perfectly appropriate for me to be angry, but I should probably max out at seven when I express it and I seem to read to other people as much higher than that. What am I teaching? The funny thing is, I don’t have much desire to change this behavior pattern of mine for the sake of the relationships I’m missing out on because people are uncomfortable with my anger. At this stage of my life I really and truly have to just be ok with making people uncomfortable, period. I don’t want to teach my children to do the same thing though. Or, rather, I want them to be able to make a decision for themselves. I want them to have an understanding that I may get intensely angry but most people don’t and most people dislike it. They get to have their own lives and figure out if they are angry or not.

Calli is at a different stage of development. She has grown increasingly cuddly and desirous of physical contact with me. She is starting to imprint pretty rapidly. She is absolutely copying my physical movements, facial expressions, and tone of voice. I have to stop yelling. I don’t actually want to live in a house where yelling happens so quickly and constantly. That places it on my head.

I’m dealing with a lot of my sources of anger. I am going to decide by the end of today if I think I am willing to do the books for the business. The answer is probably. I would like to have a way to be involved with the community. The owners and managers would become people I communicated with more. I would be able to go visit when I wanted. I was told that it isn’t reasonable for me to spend my only off-time doing more dishes. I feel valued. Thanks D.

I am figuring out my limits with regards to house cleaning and how I will manage that. I can’t live in a big mess and Shanna was born messy. When I make sure that Shanna and Calli are the only ones I’m cleaning up after, it’s a different conversation. This is my job. This is what I am doing with my life. I am caring for my children. That means I do have the entire obligation for the tornado. I’m talking to Shanna about why I clean. I show her how I do it. I am increasingly asking her for help. Often she is told, “I will clean up everything but _________. If you want to go to the park today, you need to help me clean up.” I work hard at encouraging her to play with one thing at a time and clean it up when you are done. But that’s not how Shanna plays. When Shanna plays the whole damn house is part of the game and every item of clothing and block and blanket and item of furniture is part of the story. It’s amazing to me that she really and truly has an explanation of what everything is doing. It’s not that she’s messy. She is highly creative. She needs to interact with a lot of items in order to fill her need to manipulate things. I’m trying very hard to talk to her about cleaning in a neutral tone of voice. I only manage when I’m alone.

When I’m not alone I’m angry that the other adults aren’t helping and it creeps into my voice. When I’m alone with the kids I don’t expect any one else to be doing anything so I don’t have a reason to be upset. I’m just muddling along doing my job. I care about doing my job well. When I worked at Ross Dress for Less as a teenager I was a ridiculously good employee. I kept my areas spotless and I always covered more area than I was technically assigned. I knew they weren’t giving me enough work because they were assigning work based on how much other people could get done. I have never been able to tell if I have much more energy and ability to work than other people or if other people are lazy. I think that most of it is that other people just aren’t as invested in (thing of the moment) as I am. I was told over and over and over, “If you are going to do a job, do it right.” And I consider so many parts of life, and therefore work, not optional. If it’s not optional and you have to do a job right… that means you put 100% of your energy into everything you touch, right?

This is hard to sustain. I feel like I am deficient as a person if I leave a job half done. I do it sometimes but I beat myself up for a long time. I’m learning how to put the housework into categories for myself. Right now the living room is a disaster. It looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in weeks. The entire house was completely spotless and I vacuumed and dusted and swept and mopped yesterday. I just can’t get upset. I have times of the day where I am supposed to get up and clean until the house is clean again. Then I am supposed to stop at a certain time. The house always has areas I could be doing more in. I need to deal with filing again, for example. Right now I am trying to not worry about those things because I have (deleted future stressful event) coming up. Lots of feelings.

But it’s time to get back to where I was before I dropped my basket. My kids are getting easier to care for. Calli is still a baby, but barely. She’s very nearly a kid. I realized this week that I need to get my sign language books out. She’s not going to match Shanna’s early learning curve so I need to teach her more signs. She wants to learn them but I haven’t been modeling them this time. That is something I should do. Calli clearly has opinions and wants to communicate. I haven’t been giving her enough scaffolding for being able to do that. I get the impression that her tantrums would disappear if she could just bloody say what she is thinking. Development is an interesting thing.

I’m developing an increasing appreciation of having two girls. I think I would have been the kind of asshole who thought they had boys and girls figured out because they have one of each. Calli is emerging more by the day and I find her so fascinating. She moves like me. By which I mean, she moves like my mother. I see so much family resemblance in her. I see my brothers. I don’t remember what my father looked like, not really. I don’t see my sister. She strongly resembles her biological father. But Calli has the same skull shape as me. I have a picture of me at thirteen months up on the wall in the hallway. Right next to Calli’s six week pictures. It looks like it could be the same kid.

Part of the reason this feels weird is because Shanna has always felt like a mini-me. But Shanna and Calli don’t share any of the things that make Calli feel so very startlingly like me. It feels like a strange split personality situation. They each took very different things from me. Shanna has a lot more of my personality. Shanna acts like me on my very best days. She is friendly and empathetic and eager to bring joy to people. Calli looks and moves like me but is much more reserved. She is very clearly going to be an introvert. She’s seventeen months old and she needs alone time. It’s funny because I have only started to recognize how clearly I need that as an adult. So Calli then feels like more a reflection of my moody and difficult days. That terrifies me.

I have a friend who has a very troubled relationship with her teenage daughter. I’m terrified. I’m terrified of how I will manage to get through the next two decades of trying to impersonate a stable and good mother so that my adult children will want to know me. I don’t exactly take that as a given. When I talk about my fears it’s funny how people always say, “Your kids obviously know they are loved.” My mommy does love me. She just couldn’t take care of me. And when she didn’t take care of me she told me it was my fault bad things happened to me. I’m not afraid of my kids not knowing that I love them. A lot of the reason that incestuous families are so intense is because there is just so gosh. darn. much. love. I’m not worried about my children knowing that I love them. I’m worried about my children only being exposed to age appropriate things. I’m worried about my children being told that they are to blame for circumstances beyond their control.

My children are bright and curious and indulged in activities that encourage both. That means they are going to fuck up a lot as they figure out how everything works. I get to decide what their experience of fucking up is. Do they grow up learning that perfectionist attitude of: if I ever fail I am a Failure? I think not. Everyone makes mistakes. Kids and grown ups alike. Shanna broke a glass yesterday. I can’t remember the last time she broke a glass. I think it has only happened once before. I didn’t yell. I didn’t shame. I didn’t say anything nasty. I said, “Ah man! Ok, that’s why I ask you not to set your glass on the edge of the table. Can you look around and see how far the glass shards went? Don’t get off your chair! I’ll get the broom.” Then we talked about what it means that we have broken glass on the floor. We talked about safe clean up. We talked about where glasses are supposed to sit on the table. And she got a hug and a kiss and a hope that I got all the glass shards up because I don’t want my sweet girls getting cuts on their feet. I did it right. I don’t do that every time.

But isn’t teaching interactions one of those things I’m supposed to be teaching? Ok. So I don’t do it right every time. How badly do I fuck up? How often? I don’t know. How badly do I fuck up? Not very. Not really. How often? Enh, depends on what you mean. How often do I use a tone of voice I regret? Daily. How often do I say something I regret? That’s hard to measure. It goes in bursts. I’ll have like five of them in two days because I’ll feel guilty and off-kilter after the first one. Then I won’t have one for a long time. How often do I do something I regret? Very rarely. I don’t spank not because of some crunchy ideal but because I don’t think I could use it appropriately as a consistent tool and there are much more effective tools out there. My big punishment is three minutes of time out. I lost my temper and kicked things where the kids could see once. And then I dealt with the consequences. If it happens again then there can be a reevaluation of my monster status. Everyone gets to fuck up once.

Right now I feel like I am drowning in my feelings of obligations. I can’t have interactions with people unless I am working to earn them. I’m not sure exactly what the mechanism of this is for me. But I sure treat it in-my-head like I am required to always work in exchange for someone tolerating my company. I must be paying for the effort of dealing with me. I’ll make dinner. I’ll wash your dishes. I’ll do the driving even though you are a single person and this is going to be a nightmare for me with my two kids.

I have friends who have helped me massively. I now have this huge feeling of guilt. I have been in this needy phase of life for a few years now and I feel terrible that I require so much help and I can give so little. I will never discharge this guilt though. And I don’t want to pass it on. I don’t want to feel it. I feel so much less deserving of help than other people. Other people don’t have to rely on their friends so much. Other people have families. My family wouldn’t really be able to help me even if they wanted to. Sure, they could provide “babysitting” but it would be in a neglectful and abusive environment. No thanks. I feel so much jealousy and rage that other people have families and I don’t. To that end I’m supporting Noah’s fledgling efforts to introduce our kids to his family. They aren’t perfect, but they are something. And they want to love the girls. I don’t want my kids to grow up like me. I don’t want them to grow up knowing that there are all these relatives but none of them have any interest in them.

All these feelings around housework and obligation and love and caring for people and physical limitations and support and abandonment… it’s all one big mess. I’m going to be an asshole for a minute and say that acts of service is probably my primary ‘spoken’ love language. Having someone see that I am tired and offer to carry my load? That is a lot of what lets me feel loved and seen. I’m not invisible. Yes, I am happy to do all this work because I love you. But I need to be coaxed too. I need to be coddled too. I am tired too.

Noah spent a while last night laying out his timeline on burdening me. We talked about how it has gone in the past, how it is currently, and how things will go in the future. Noah went down a long list of reasons explaining why he thinks he needs to just step up and do a bunch of things right now. Noah specifically talked about the things I have done for him and why he wants to turn around and help me. I can’t ask for that help. I can’t direct it. I don’t know why. I know that is a failure on my part. Noah explained in detail that he has learned over time to notice a variety of signs that my difficulty level is much higher than I am expressing. On one hand it feels kind of weird being decoded and on the other hand I didn’t know how much I was apparently hiding or lying about or something.

Yesterday I found out that one person recognizes that I am past my breaking point and I am going to get help. In the past week I have made it such that I am not going to be providing much help to anyone but the kids any more. It feels needlessly extreme, but it seems to be necessary for me. I can’t be one of the modern women who gets everything done for everyone. I don’t want to figure out how to rescue an unproductive day. I want to revel in days where we spend all day lying in the sun talking about all the things I see. I talk about plants and clouds and buildings. I talk about how people behave. I talk about how things are made. I talk about metal and plastic and rubber. I talk about what it means to be responsible. Unproductive days mean I am too busy enjoying what I am doing. I can live with that.

I want my daughters to learn that for everything there is a season. Some day they will work. I will almost certainly work at some point. I’ll get bored without something to do. But for now what we are doing is learning together. I have to spend all the time that I can with my kids learning about the world because there is so much to learn. How will we get it all done?

I have let Shanna have basically unfettered access to the iPad. She watches a lot of Fraggle Rock, Thomas, She-Ra and then she has her movies. She is increasingly playing with games. She is doing the letter tracing. She’s fascinated with youtube and what she can learn there. I uhhh don’t know how she found nail polish and makeup tutorials, but she has had fun playing with those. I don’t let her have access to youtube on the iPad. That has to be used with an adult because bad links pop up. I feel comfortable with this now because she uses it for a variety of things and she is incredibly physically active. She likes to go on multiple mile walks with me. I keep telling Calli that iPads are three year old toys. We’ll see how long that goes.

So much is in my head and so much of it I can’t write about. Life is really complicated. I keep telling myself that everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

From here on out Noah is the person I have lived with the longest of anyone in my life. With the exception of Jenny and our other housemate, I don’t have contact with anyone I have ever lived with. Ok, sometimes I run into Tom, but our lives have diverged. Noah is the only carrier of my story. Noah is the only one I have to worry about being appropriate for. Wow. That’s actually an interesting thought. When I’m having my ambient feelings of guilt for my behavior, Noah is the only one I will really have to worry about. I have the kids for ~17 more years and then they are adults.

That’s a lot more pressure than it seems like. A specific kind of pressure I don’t do well with. I feel I owe my children a decent childhood. I brought them into a world they didn’t make. I have obligations to them. I have a very different relationship with Noah. I owe him nothing but what I choose to owe him. Yet in every way that matters I would be a fool to not see Noah as “rescuing” me. I feel like he took a chance on a stupid gutter kid, and this is how I repay him? By being needy and whiny and incompetent and angry? I feel like he is getting a bad deal. And that makes me feel savagely angry that all I have to give is a bad deal. I am a bad deal.

I was certainly a bad deal for Sarah. I failed her. I need far more help than she can give and I can’t help feeling angry about it. That’s not her fault. That’s not something she is actually to blame for. She’s not doing anything wrong. But I feel it. And I take it out on her. And that’s wrong. I am wrong. I don’t know why I need so much help. It doesn’t seem like other mothers I know get even as much help as I get. They don’t seem to fail as often. They seem to be able to handle getting things done in a lot of different places. I can’t track it. I need to have my responsibilities all lie pretty close to one source.

There are a lot of things I don’t know or understand. Right now I know that the sun is up and the sky is a beautiful blue. The clouds are all drifting out of sight. It’s been raining for a few days here. For once I don’t hear a bunch of people whining about rain. Almost everyone who has commented on the weather has been grateful for it. I feel like for one storm we are all collectively breathing a sigh of thanks. We need the rain. The drought is ongoing. I hope the clouds come back. We need more rain. Besides, when it rains I don’t have to go outside and water. I’ve made a bunch of progress on the front yard recently. Now that the rain washed all those obnoxious white rocks clean, I should probably take pictures. It’s looking more like a garden. I don’t know when I will get the playhouse made. I screwed up billpay and we had some unexpected expenses. The house part of the budget is overspent for many months. I’m sad about that. Oh well. It just means I have more time to dream about it. My kids are getting the house and yard I would have enjoyed growing up in. I hope they like the experience. I’m trying to not be oppressive about it.

Time to go inside.

The end of the all depression all the time hour.

Evil Soul

3 Replies

So I’m a counter phobic 6, as least that is what Noah tells me. And Rebecca. And other people concurred. Maybe someday I will study the Enneagram and I will decide if I agree or not. Until then all I know is the more something scares me the more intensely focused on it I am. And right now I am so terrified of what I am currently thinking about that I am shaking. It is difficult to type. The thing is, what I am afraid of is being called a liar. I’m afraid of someone reading this and saying it isn’t true. When I first starting writing about things like this I was in graduate school. It was actually a fiction writing class. I chose to write creative non-fiction, basically telling stories about my trauma, because I couldn’t think of anything else to write. I didn’t present it that way to the class. One of the other students was very assertive in her position that what I was writing was unrealistic and not very good. I haven’t ditched that criticism yet, though I should.

I’m scared to write about these things because they are crazy. Really, seriously crazy. Why do I think they are that crazy? Because I have spent my adult life around atheists who have no patience for the woo. But I believe in the woo. And I need to own that and stop beating around the bush and just… say it.

Oh god this hurts. I found it. I had to come back to it. I had to come looking for the dark place instead of waiting for it to find me. That was harder than I thought. It was a lot harder than I thought to get back to this frantic state where I have to type or I am going to explode. It is even neat to me that I can’t say these words, I do need to type them. Thank god for computers. Fuck computers. That’s my life. And I’m already losing it. Shit.

After therapy this week Noah and I decided that it was a great night to go do more of the two chair thing starting at about 10. I was wired for sound. Something that came up a lot in therapy and then later with Noah was thinking about my current level of suicidal ideation. It’s really at an alarmingly high level. I feel more active compulsion than I have in years. My therapist asked me if I wanted to get into it with her and I told her no. When I told Noah that I had done that he responded with, “Ah! A challenge!” or the slightly less bombastic equivalent, which nonetheless means the same thing.

I am suicidal. Statistically speaking it’s really quite unsurprising. My particular brand of suicidal seems to be spurred mostly by shame. But here I am using my analytic voice. And each word of composition is ponderously considered, difficultly spelled, and not conducive to actually doing this. Let’s try something else.

It’s really scary to let these feelings come up. I feel intense pressure in my chest. I feel my throat tighten. I want to sob uncontrollably and yet I can’t breathe enough to get out sound. This is one of the feelings that produce intense, copious liquid tears. Often in other times when I cry I rack with sobs but no liquid comes out. I wonder why there is such variation in crying. And oh look. That was a really weak ass, uninteresting derail. Maybe some discomfort? Ha.

I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna talk about being terrible. I don’t want to say out loud that I believe I am evil. I believe my brother and my father are dead because I was loud and drew attention to myself and everything bad that came after is all my fault. I believe I am evil because my father whispered into my ear from when I was a tiny child that I was a witch. I have casually told stories for years about my maternal grandmother being a witch and I’ve told stories about things she supposedly did.

I learned every single one of those stories from my father. And the grandmother in question was not his. He was villainizing—no… he was literally demonizing my mother’s bloodline. He bloody well convinced me that I cannot escape being evil. He repeatedly encouraged me to seek out black magic because I had powers. When I was a teenager I read a bunch of books about Wicca, Shamanism, and a few other off-shoot pagan religions. I tried to cast a spell on a then-boyfriend to make him become obsessed with me. Hey, The Craft had just come out. He did become pretty obsessed with me. I think it’s much more likely that he became obsessed with me because I was a pretty girl who was willing to have sex with him.

But oh my god. I have built up this entire narrative in my life about how that scared me off of trying to pursue more magical endeavors because I have power. That is the crux of it. I have power. I do. The fact that I have survived my life is pretty much proof. I have survived my father molesting me all through my earliest memories. I have survived risky sexual activity during the periods of intense acting out I have had. The 25 year old man who fucked me at my request when I was 12 years old didn’t wear a condom. He was a drug dealer in Santa Clara. His name was Sean David Segura. And no, I don’t feel bad for naming him. Yes, I do. I hate that I feel like he deserves the shield of anonymity. He didn’t rape me and I’m not claiming he did. Only I was 12 years old and reeling from the last time my father sexually assaulted me and I wasn’t being supervised because no one gave a shit about me and I ran wild. I did it because everyone in my life was forcing me to be a grown up but I wasn’t fucking ready. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready. I have been having sex as a consenting adult since I was 12 years old. That’s 18 years. Super Bowl Sunday is my “anniversary”. No wonder I feel so.fucking.old. I started working when I was 15. It was intermittent at first, but I contributed an awful lot towards my support. My mother would pick up my paycheques and dole out my $20/week allowance. It was festive. This is relevant, but not what I am doing tonight.

I have power. I have gone through fucking hell. My early childhood was abusive in ways I am just beginning to be able to understand. I became an adult at 12 years old. I made some really really bad choices along the way. I did not choose the straight and narrow at pretty much any point. Why did I survive? How was I able to keep so much of me private from my family and the abuse? I think I have power. I don’t know how to explain this and I’ve spent my lifetime wracking it back and forth in my brain. I don’t even know if this is just how it works for absolutely everyone on the planet. But when I decide I want something I god damn make it happen. Whether it is good or bad. The only thing really big goal I have set that I haven’t made was getting my masters. But I started grad school because I wanted to have more knowledge before I started being a teacher because I felt unqualified. Uhm, well, I met that goal. Why again am I a failure because I didn’t obtain a piece of paper that would impress other people but not improve my life? Yeah, scratch that. I am a god damn rock star. When I say I am going to do something, I do it.

Only that’s not true. That’s the positive side of my brain. I’m there maybe 70% of the time when I’m doing extraordinarily well. I’m there like 45% of the time right now. It’s odd to flipflop back and forth between that kind of optimism and the kind of overwhelming self-hatred I have. I don’t have ‘meh’ feelings about myself. I either think I am amazingly wonderful or I am so despicable that I am using the power I have to do evil. Oh, and I have lots of silly examples of things that I decide I want and then they magically appear in my life (no really) but the best one is the dream about Tommy’s accident. I haven’t explained that yet. It’s 11:43 pm on a Thursday night and my children will be awake (possible multiple times) within 6 hours. Why the hell not tell that story. (Editing note: it is now 3:48 am on Saturday and I haven’t slept much since starting this.)

(Minor background note: my parents divorced when I was 3. There was knowledge at the time of the divorce of sexual abuse but the belief was it only happened to my sister. Or at least that is what I was always told growing up. I am currently struggling with my feelings around what I think my mom did or didn’t know and that’s challenging for me. But that’s a digression for a different day. My mom and I bounced around moving a lot. I went to 25 schools before dropping out of high school in my junior year. My brothers mostly lived with our father.)

So to start this right, I have to set the stage. That’s what you do, right? I was either 6 or 7. Tommy wanted to come live with us for a while. We were living with Auntie and Uncle B. in Northern California in the house they still live in. One night Tommy and I were bickering, as a 6ish and 10ish year old sibling pair will do that sort of thing. My uncle intervened. Specifically speaking he started yelling at my brother and spilled a cup of boiling liquid on my brother. Luckily my brother escaped major damage. But that was it. We were out.

Basically, I baited my brother and then we had to move. But I don’t want to leave the story like that. There was a lot going on. My brother and I had weird sibling dynamics. I was significantly more intelligent than him and better in school but he was good at sports and charming and knew how to get along. I was prickly and difficult and acting out. I wasn’t an innocent victim in the situation, but neither am I to blame for all of it. And ultimately it was my mother, as the adult, who handled the situation badly and abused us and set us up to fight so… yeah. Maybe not any of it was really my fault. But it will always feel like my fault. It will always feel like I was mean to Tommy and then everything in my life blew up. That is my story. That is what is stuck in my head. That is the age I am. I’m 7. Maybe I should do some research on 7 year olds. And that is the end of where this digression is useful.

My mom packed up our stuff and drove south through LA to drop off Tommy back at our dad’s house. My mom and I went off to Oklahoma and Texas and that was a whole adventure. Texas is was where I was raped for the first time when I was 7. But one night in May of 1989 my brother Tommy was hit by a car. Specifically, he was hit by a drunk accident injury attorney. It’s almost comedic. Only it’s tragic. He was on drugs and the belief is that he was more or less trying to commit suicide. He succeeded. He was hit by a car on Imperial Highway, which if you know Southern California is a major road.

(Side note: shoulders, center of breath and ability to move between mindsets)

Tommy died. Sure they brought him back but he was never the same. He had a severe traumatic brain injury. He had a horrible life up until I prosecuted my father and Tommy once again tried to kill himself. This time he went out walking and bought a gas can. He went behind a shopping center. He doused himself in gasoline and he lit himself on fire. Tommy was still alive when they got him to the hospital even though 80% of his body was burned. My father, in one of the most magnanimous acts of his life, told them to turn off life support and let Tommy die.
The story in my head is that Tommy’s suicide was my fault because I prosecuted my father and Tommy couldn’t handle the idea of our father going to prison. But it’s total fucking bullshit. The truth is Tommy had been suicidal from when he was a small child and he tried over and over and over and over in more and less successful ways over the years. There was a long period where he had to wear a helmet and boxing gloves full time because he had a habit of shoving his head through windows for fun. How in the hell is it my fault that he finally succeeded?

But it is. And I am trembling with terror as I try to write this. My lizard brain is screaming out in terror no no no no no no I’m bad I’m bad I’m bad it’s all my fault. I killed Tommy. I killed Tommy twice with my selfishness. God gave him back and let me have a second chance at being a good little sister and I killed my big brother twice. And I believe this because I believe I have the power to influence things great and small. And I hated Tommy more than almost anyone on this earth.

Admitting that about my poor, dead brother makes me wrack with sobs. You are not supposed to speak ill of the dead. Tommy had a brain injury. It wasn’t his fault. I should be loving in my thoughts towards him. But I’m fucking glad the son of a bitch is dead. As much as my every memory of my father is laced with molestation, every memory of Tommy is laced with cruelty. He liked to see me in pain. Really it was my first SM relationship and I just didn’t know it. Tommy would arrange to have other people beat me up. Tommy was there the day I was thrown off the monkey bars and broke my arm when I was 6. He pretty much told the kid to do it. After the accident Tommy hated me with the intensity of the sun. He did things to me that hurt every single day. Practically any time I came within arms reach. As he got older and further through puberty he would attack me and try to knock me down so he could rape me.

Our father told him that if he couldn’t get sex outside the family it was my responsibility to provide it for him and he was allowed to take it.
This was my reality growing up. These were the things that went on behind closed doors. And I’m talking about them. I’m telling the secrets. And I feel like I will choke to death. I feel intense shame and horror. Seeing these stories in front of me like this hurts. When the stories just keep coming and there is detail after detail after detail and I know I am leaving 90% of the horror out of the story for the sake of time to write it all down…oh my god. It was monstrous. Why does this continually surprise me? Because day by day one atrocity at a time you can’t see the picture. You can’t see how horrible it is. And this is a nice digression and all, but it feels awfully comfy and that can’t be useful.

Yes, actually there is something very useful here. I grew up to have a four year long bdsm relationship with a man named (tbd). I called him Daddy. For two of those years (the middle two) we were in a 24/7 Master/slave relationship. Oh my god. There is so much there to write about. I need to write about him. But not today. Not till he says it is ok.

I’m supposed to be talking about being suicidal. But I really don’t want to. It hurts to talk about being suicidal. And I’m experiencing a lot of bursts of manic creativity in other directions and that is really rare for me so I am on to something big. This has to be huge. What the fuck is this.
I’m feeling a lot of internal pushback about talking about the witchcraft stuff. This is really hard for me. This is the part where I start to feel awkward and uncomfortable because I don’t feel secure that it is ok to have the beliefs that I have. Right this minute I’m feeling very freaked out because what portion of my very odd belief structure is taken directly from my father’s brain washing. Oh my fucking god I was brainwashed into believing magic and believing that I am an evil force in the world.

No no no no. Fuck you. I’m not going to do that. Saying that does not make it true. I feel incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of being brainwashed. I’m not going to let that be something I sit with right now. I’m allowed to make that choice.

I believe in magic. I believe that if you want something bad enough you will take action and create that thing in your life. I believe this is a
positive and good thing. Given that I have repeatedly managed to shove myself through ridiculous amounts of work in very short periods of time I would say it works for me. I’m allowed to have this belief without my father being allowed to take it away. I wonder if that is behind the current obsession with Alice in Wonderland. I’m playing in my mind with the idea of agency and Alice is certainly a very different character through the different representations of her. I feel like I am turning about looking in funhouse mirrors trying to figure out which version of my agency is the right one. How much control do I get to believe I have in the universe.

Oh god this hurts. I found it. I had to come back to it. I had to come looking for the dark place instead of waiting for it to find me. That was harder than I thought. I believe that my father’s death is my fault. I believe it with an intensity that consumes me. And I have a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome and I want my fucking Daddy. That is what is going on. I am thinking about him molesting me. I am thinking about him hurting me. I want him. I want to be hurt. I want to do an intense sm scene. I want to do something horrible and destructive.

I want to kill myself.

What other act is there in the world that I could commit that would prove beyond the shadow of a doubt to every single person in the whole wide world that I am a worthless piece of shit and my father wanted to rape me and I kind of wish he had. I wish he had raped me instead of killing himself because then I wouldn’t feel this fucking guilty. And that is what I am hiding from. And that. Oh dear god.

I believe that prosecuting him was an evil act that forced him to do it. I believe I had the ability, with my hate, to do that to him. But I don’t really have that power. And I wasn’t acting out of evil. I was a scared half-kid-half-adult who was flailing around trying to not die. There was no bad in defending myself. I’m allowed to say no. I know that now, as an adult.

The funny thing is, reading this… you’d think I have trouble expressing boundaries. But I don’t. I’m actually fantastically good at expressing boundaries. I explore how to expand and retract them as necessary on a frequent basis. I put exhausting quantities of energy into defending my boundaries in a way that I believe is in the “range of acceptable normal boundaries” and I have to see it that way or I can’t do it at all.

I’m going to take a break here to say that this piece of writing is brought to you courtesy of a California Medical Marijuana permit. Without it I would be crying and beating my head against a wall and trying to slit my wrists. Instead I am writing productively in a way that is completely outside the parameters of my normal life and I am able to carry on as a functional human being during the day. Right now I am fighting to save my life because if I don’t deal with the extent of my father sexually assaulting me I don’t know if I will see my daughters grow up because I don’t know where else to begin fighting the monsters in my head. I have to say all of this out loud. And that is hard. That means going places my brain doesn’t want to let me go. I have to hack my brain and it hurts a lot. I’m not sure I can say I recommend this method of dealing with trauma. But if you feel like you don’t have a lot of time, why the hell not. I think this is my favorite digression ever.

See, I don’t want to talk about being suicidal. Being suicidal hurts. It makes me cry. I feel like I am evil and bad. No really. I believe that with an intensity that overwhelms me at random points in my life and I cannot focus on what is before me. I think I am barely aware it is happening, but it colors my intense paranoia. I am not reaching out to specific people right now because I believe no one wants me to. And I truly know this is paranoia because I sent out an invitation to a birthday party on Labor Day weekend five months in advance and within 24 hours I had 27 people who said they wanted to be there. It is simply not possible that everyone in the world thinks I am bad. It is more likely that people are busy and don’t notice me. It’s not personal. But I am doing what my mother does. I am sitting at home feeling like everything is wrecked forever and ever and ever because this terrible thing happened to our family and I can’t get passed it. Only for me right now it is the story of my abuse. I am stuck in cycles that are not good for me. I am trying to blow up my life because I cannot handle stability. I cannot handle stability because I was horrifically abused. I need to work through that and it’s going to hurt.

I am suicidal because I am the victim of incest and sexual assault. I am suicidal because I believe the things my father told me. I believe I am evil and a witch. I believe it deep in my monkey brain and I don’t know how to get these things out of me.

No. Fuck that noise. I don’t know yet. I haven’t done it yet. Just because I haven’t done it yet doesn’t mean I won’t. It will just be harder. I’m really tired of harder. I’d like a break one of these years. But if I have to get stronger I will. Because that is what I do. Because that is who I am. I have a really good, really stable life now and I am not going to fuck it up. I am going to hold it together. And I am going to write in the middle of the night. And I will get passed this.

But not in this essay. Because it is now 5:22 am on Saturday morning. My agenda for today is rather a busy one you see. Today I get to: finish the side yard drainage problem no matter how long it takes me nor how much it hurts because otherwise I won’t have a smooth pathway for people to walk on when they come to my Easter party and it is very very very important to me in my neurosis that when people come to my home they have a smooth path. No one there would judge me poorly in any way if I said, “We had a flooding problem in the last rainstorm and the yard is full of weird potholes because I have been dealing with a severe mental health crisis and I haven’t had time to deal with it!” But that’s not ok to say. That would be stepping all over the boundaries of everyone who wants to be generically, softly encouraging of my life in a light social way. So instead I will write intense journal entries in the middle of the night. I will frantically repair my side yard until I believe that I will not be embarrassed to have people see it. Before anyone gives me a panicked phone call, I’ve got it mostly done. You see, I don’t have the luxury of sitting down to do a project all in one go in one day basically ever. I’ve been working on the side yard for days. My entire body hurts. I am physically and mentally exhausted. I feel like I have nothing left to give to any part of my life.

But do you know what I will do? I will finish the delicious scone I have been noshing on with a nod to my wonderful online girlfriend who is doing a lot to help me grow right now and I will plaster a smile on my face. This was a really really big success in the war for me. I’m proud of it. No one gets to make me be silent any more. I can talk about my demons. I can brainstorm ways to deal with them. I can invite commentary. I can be real about the fact that there are two sides to every story but the only one that matters in my recovery is mine. I have to be aware of not losing my story to thoughts of being the scapegoat. I am not to fucking blame for almost anything that happened to me as a child. And I have behavioral patterns that I watch like a hawk. Because I have come a long way. I do hold it together. Shit. Or maybe this will be a rough day. Fuck.

2 Replies

So my first living on less challenge for myself. We have Easter coming up and I would like to host a brunch for some friends. I think it sounds like fun. Because I am a huge dorkwad a lot of what I want to do is get my back yard to a place where it would be fun to be in. I need a short-term goal to reach. I want to spend no more than $50, to be taken out of our entertainment budget. How am I going to reach this goal? There are many things to figure out. How many people would I like to host? In particular, Shanna and I are both excited about the upcoming egg hunt. I’m not sure if our friends-with-small-kids will want to come over though. Well, you have to ask if you want things so I’ll figure that bit out. We’ll have to decide what kinds of foods to serve and decorating. On $50. It’s a good thing I have some time to plan.

Luckily I already have someone coming (hopefully today) to take the shed out of my back yard and I found a table/chair/umbrella set on freecycle a couple of weeks ago. That’s the first big step towards making the backyard more fun for a party. I also need to go find some free fill dirt for some of the fuss in the yard. That’s going to be exciting. But! This can be done!

I would like to have some decorations as well. I wonder what Shanna and I can make. 🙂

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: yard

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The end of the all depression all the time hour.

Evil Soul