R is for Railway Spine, Battle Fatigue, Shellshock, and Other Clever Ways of Saying PTSD

I have a problem.

I don't trust the world.

The theological upshots of this for a person dealing with a non-transcendental religious system are not minor.  (If I were looking to get out of my body and get to heaven, not trusting the world would probably be some kind of bloody bonus.  Of course it is a vale of tears and a source of trauma, right?  Pfeh.)

All those immanent, pan(en)theistic, naturally manifesting gods and spirits, they're part of the world, right?  And the world ...

The world has a lot of things in it.  And a lot of my experiences with those things have been unsettling.  (And I'm explicitly being personal here, not geopolitical.) I'm not just talking about sexual violence or harassment here, though that's the obvious thing that people leap to and something that's on the mind lately.  There's bullying, there's emotional abuse, there's lack of privacy, there's disrespect for boundaries of all kinds, there's a lack of awareness of the potential for differences among people leading to the erasure of some experiences, there's the full panoply of -isms and -phobias, there's ....

A long time ago I happened to look up the symptom-set for PTSD and I had all of them but one.  My liege, training to be an acupuncturist, says that the defensive layer of my energetic bodies is hair-trigger and twitchy, which he suggests may be part and parcel of the same sort of thing.  And, in all things, my response to the world's minor inconveniences and issues is to ... go away.

Dissociation is a skill, actually, and it's one that I'm pretty damn good at.  Reflexively good at.  It's not just the year or more of my teenage years where I have no memories written to disk, though that's a pretty primo example of not being in the world or of it.

And being reflexively good at absence is a bit of a problem when cultivating presence.  When the work has to do with being embodied, with engaging with the world, the fact that there's a soul-presence that responds to the concept of the world by whining like a tortured puppy and retreating into a corner to minimise potential avenues of attack is ... a problem.

It's not a problem I know entirely how to address, though I've been talking with my inner puppy a lot and asking about what could help....

(I think "railway spine" is actually "whiplash" but you know that works as a metaphor too.)

P is for Preparation

Sometimes, the hard work in magic, in ritual, in whatever, is heavily in the groundwork.  In the preparation.  Not in what one does, but in getting ready to do things.

For the last few weeks I have been doing preparatory work for a ritual.  The ritual involves my maternal grandmother, the child of Polish immigrants, and, among other things, her troubled relationship with her own heritage which has led to me not having a sense of my own.  There are important things in here, in my religious practices, in my personal life, in my arc of healing, in my own becoming a mother: and Little Foot has, as a middle name, this grandmother's name.

I tend the shrine.  Not as regularly as I perhaps ought, but I light the candle, I offer water, I burn incense.  I cultivate mindfulness of this particular thread of bloodline, even as I give blood to the medical personnel who are analysing it for traces of this particular heritage.  I think that I do not have enough in my shrine for this piece of heritage, and wonder where the jewelry boxes are that have this grandmother's gifts in them, the costume-jewelry pins in the shape of cats and a few similar things.  (We are still not moved in to the new house, and so many things are hidden away in storage.)  I spent this morning going through photographs from my childhood, pursuing the names of relatives, reawakening old memories, coming to new understandings from moments caught in time that I was too young to read, before.

There is something deep working here, as I look through the photographs, as I see things and have the context of an adult to bring to the occasionally blurry moments in time long ago.

My father is visiting.  He had been planning to visit a few weeks ago, but changed his plans because he had to take a business trip.

To Poland.

He brought me the usual collection of oddments and endments, and, almost as an afterthought, asked me if I would like some Polish coins.  I said yes. (I have an odd collection of international coinage, mostly brought from his business trips, though I did once startle someone immensely in a hotel room in Minneapolis when he said to me, in a bit of an in-joke, "You are [...] and I claim my five pounds" and I promptly fished through the pockets of my jacket - which I had brought with me on a trip to the UK a couple of years before - and eventually managed to produce five pounds in miscellaneous loose change.  This was perhaps not the expected joke result, to be four thousand miles from home and presented with a punchline in one's native currency.)

He handed me a pill bottle's worth of coins, reserving one of them, a little thing about the size of a dime.

"This one is special," he said.  "They're pretty rare, and it's said that they're lucky."

"Because they're the equivalent of a penny?" I asked, turning the coin over in my fingers and attempting to read the back.

"More like a quarter penny."

I studied my Polish farthing for a moment, and thought about magic.  As I reach back towards my Polish grandmother, speaking of peace, speaking of connection and continuance, I am given a little piece of luck from Poland.

Preparation can also come with signs, I suppose.

D is for the Divine Androgyne

(This one is probably not a shocker to the remainder of my long-term readers.)

I was actually tickled that one of last week's Pagan Blog Project posts was a takedown on some of the concepts of 'the divine feminine', because I already had this sucker in my mental queue.

In and around the edges of my reality, I know a couple of people who describe themselves as neutrois, which is a concept that I poke at occasionally. I think I've come to the conclusion that neutrois is so exactly what I'm not that it's actually kind of similar in practice, which is an interesting thing. Mostly incidental, but I'll mention it because it's actually relevant background.

As is this post from P. Sufenas Virius Lupus of the Aedicula Antonoi, from which I will quote:

The final being in this new tetrad of deities is complex, and was the result of the efforts of all three of the others working together–each can be said to have “fathered” this final being, and each can be said to have “given birth” to em, and yet none of them fathered nor gave birth to this being either in any way that would be recognizable by humans and most deities currently operating. This final being was called Panaletheia, “All-Truth,” by Panhyle; Panpsyche called em Paneirene, “All-Peace”; Paneros called em Pankalos, “All-Beauty”; but this being named emself Pancrates, All-Power. Pancrates (not to be confused with Pancrates/Pachrates of Heliopolis, mind you!) can be described as androgynous or as pan-gendered, and exhibits characteristics that could be found in every and any gender, both mentally, behaviorally, spiritually, and physically. One of Pancrates’ symbols is the lion.

Last autumn I was wrestling with an assignment for my training. For those who are familiar with the Thelemic rituals of the Stations of the Sun, it was similar work - an address to the transformational nature of the times of day, rooted in relationship with the encompassing divine. I had written several such litanies over the course of my training, all of them perfectly good poetry, none of them an improvement over the verse around which my practice had been originally built.

The original verse addressed the All-Mother in the form of a rose. I tried to address the All-Mother in the form of the lotus - my preferred Egyptian symbol. I tried to address the All-Mother as a cow, as a raptor, in all Her various forms. Nothing seemed to work right.

I commented, unrelatedly, to my teacher, that I was not yet old enough to be able to be a child.

And I dabbled, in free corners of my brain, with associating the kabbalistic Tree of Life to the Heliopolitan cosmogony, because I found it funny.

Up until.

I wrote another daily litany. Addressing the Solar Child borne by the All-Mother, who is of necessity not exclusively of one gender, because as governor of Malkuth the Child must encompass all of the possibilities that emerge from Kether and reflect the entire Tree.

That one fucking worked.

And perhaps I have been enough of the Mother and need to learn to be the Child. Heru-sa-Aset in His name of Heru-pa-Khered, the hawk, perhaps having more than a passing acquaintance with Pancrates the lion. However one wants to look at it. Here S/He is, the emerging manifestation, the Solar Child laid bloody on the Mother's lap at dawn, ascendent to rule at noon, returning to nourishment at sunset, forged and cradled anew through the night.

I had had Issues with some of the relentless maleness of power in Egyptian religion, not just in Heru's status as male but in how kingship itself was a male role to the point that Hatshepsut put on the same false beard as any other ruler. (And I think, as I put my daughter to sleep, of how I named her for a famous king of Poland.) But this Child, this Divine Androgyne, this one who Becomes as Khepri becomes, this is a Heru I know. All potentials, not just the ones that come of some form of maleness; all rulership, all governance, not just the bearded kind.

And perhaps I am old enough to be a Child now. Not a girl-child nor indeed a boy-child, but the Divine Androgyne, the Solar Child who ascends with all the other gods and bathes in the Field of Rushes before the gates of heaven.

Ghost in the Dwelling

My lion asked me yesterday how I was doing, and after a lot of circling around the subject and trying to figure out how to say things, I finally hit the revelation:

"I'm angry with my mother."

(No shit. I live in a universe of angry with my mother. But, he quite reasonably asked:)

"Why? She hasn't been all that much in contact, has she? I mean, what's she done?"

I tried to explain. Explain that every time I talk to her, if I mention that something is hard with taking care of Little Foot, that I'm feeling in some way hemmed in or tired or stressed or any of the normal things that motherhood brings, her voice takes on this knowing cast, and she says something like, "Yep, that's what it's like. That's what it'll be for the next twenty years! You gave up your life."

This parenting gig, it's hard work. It is one of the most wonderful, rewarding, bloody difficult things I have ever done in my life, because it's a thing that I have wanted to do, that my heart has yearned for.

And every time she says something like this, it gets just a little bit harder. Or maybe a lot harder.

Because I am still a person, no matter how much she wants to turn me into the negative phrasing of the Angel of the Household, the madonna of self-sacrificing motherhood. I still have things that I want to do with my life - that I am doing with my life - even if I have to wedge them around the crevices. And I have to wedge them around the crevices because there's still that legacy of Victoriana, the two spheres, the "real world" and the domestic area that I, as a nursing mother, preside over with my apron and wooden spoon, only I haven't got an apron anyway and Little Foot wants to play with the spoon.

I resent the way the culture surrounding me sets me up to be an unperson now. I resent it, and I wish to change it, and I do things like thinking about joining a church to expand the base of my support structure, to maybe find a community with like-aged children so that Little Foot can grow up with friends, to do all the things that might shore up the slumping walls of my Fortress of Unsolitude that I inhabit as the not all that super mom. I am, since Little Foot arrived, more driven to be political, to find community to be active in, to do all of these things that people do, as well as my own work (terribly neglected in the perpetual onslaught of the nine-month-old), and that politicality comes with a keener awareness of the way that I am marginalised.

Oh, I am doing So Many Things Right, with the breastfeeding and all, and isn't it nice that I'm dedicating myself to being a good mother, and now I can be completely glossed over as a person because I will be off doing BABYBABYBABY, right, that's not something that real people have to bother their pretty little heads about, they can go do real people things. Like work, and have relationships, and achieve things that matter in the world, and 'things that matter' don't include 'raising a loving and loved child to be a healthy human being'.

And that's what my mother tells me, over and over again. That I've given up any chance I had to be real for a good long time. This velveteen rabbit will not breathe and bleed and hop on its own, no matter how much it's loved. Because all my real gets drained away, magically, into childrearing.

What you see here is a clever fake.

So that's why I'm angry at my mother right now.

Or A Serious Expression In The Middle Of July

The Mother's for Women's Lib carnival linked me to this post, which contains this paragraph:

Not only are traditionally female fan objects and fan engagements devalued, the very gender identity of the fan thus becomes problematic: reading done in private by women is a selfish and time-wasting activity, and fannish investment is a selfish and time-wasting squandering of emotion. Mothers, however, are meant to focus their activities and emotions on one target only: their family. Capitalist culture has long been undergirded by domestic ideology: the man’s primary domain is the capitalist world, where selfishness and aggressivity are rewarded, while the woman’s primary domain is home, where she creates social awareness by selflessly volunteering and providing moral guidance for the next generation. I’m taking this directly from my domestic/bourgeois ideology lecture for the British nineteenth century, but frankly, living in a white middle class suburban area with two kids in private school, the ideological structure of my community doesn’t really look all that different.

And that's an interesting thing.

I have gotten, since Little Foot was born, profoundly jealous of what time I get to spend on myself. And it's hard, on a lot of levels - I mean, starting with the comment "being selfish is one of the worst crimes a woman can commit without breaking the law" but also all the ways in which my time is circumscribed - whether because I actively need to be minding Little Foot or, like now: she finally went down for a nap, after a fussy day in which she largely refused to sleep. I should go, for example, grab the towels out of the bathroom and wash them, but if I put her down she might wake up. (She has been very, very easy to wake of late, alas.) Which necessity - the dirty towels or the unrested infant - rules?

I have always struggled with taking time for myself, seesawing between complete self-sacrifice and a tendency towards indulgence without ever quite knowing where the range of legitimate behaviour fell. It is not something - growing up in a context where any time spent on myself was proof of my selfishness - that I learned well. Nor a culture designed to help rational thought on the subject, even if I were not kept from learning it at home.

And there are the half-spoken assumptions: that of course the lion and I would stop playing games when we have children, for example. That our recreations will become proper, whatever that means. I already watch baseball games, maybe we'd have to take up more television sports? Or - to really buy into the mythologies of adulthood, that his world would be consumed with Job and my world would be consumed with Baby and neither of us would ever have scope for our own pursuits again, except maybe a movie every year or two when the stars align and someone else could mind the babe.

I find myself strung up by the self-doubt, neither counting off tasks - fold the laundry, clean the bedroom, catalogue the crate of books, whatever else - nor taking time to relax, poised between the two because I have no space to give myself for either.

I think maybe this is why I'm tired.

Ignorance and Bliss

I was, for various reasons, having That Conversation the other day. The interminable one, with someone who almost certainly means well, but hasn't quite managed to claw up to spitting distance of social awareness. You know how it goes; you ask, "Look, do you worry about whether you'll be raped if you go out?" and get a response like, "I totally worry about being mugged, I live in a bad part of town." (Because we all know that women totally don't ever have to worry about being mugged; it's one crime or the other.)

Anyway.

One of the other people in That Conversation commented that her moment of revelation was a Savage Love column in which someone had written in asking for advice for how to deal with anal tears, because she'd been mucking about with bondage with her partner and he took advantage of her helplessness to do something she'd previously refused. It hadn't occurred to the writer that she'd been raped.

And, well, it hadn't occurred to the person relating the story that that was rape either. Because she had internalised the "sexuality is like this: resist resist resist resist resist lie-back-and-think-of-England-in-the-end". So: revelation! That is rape!

My first thought on this was relief that I had never been that naive.

My second thought, following immediately after, was that actually, I had been.

Because the cascade that led into my assault was, as I've ruminated before, a long chain of violations, minor building up to major, where I hadn't figured out if I wanted any of them - and by the time I realised I had wanted to say no long ago, it seemed so pointless, so cruel; he expected to be able to do that stuff now, it would be so nasty to suggest that I didn't like it, right? It wasn't nice to lead people on like that. All of the minor transgressions were written off as the price of my failures of promptness, and anything built upon them likewise, not because of resist-and-submit per se, but the same complex of expectation. The things already lost cannot be a crime against person, because they are lost already. And that is what sex is about: resist-and-submit, and if I wasn't able to articulate the 'resist' right on, well, that left me the resolution to do.

Tied for third thought, cascading out of this moment of someone else's enlightenment:

That I didn't know what happened to me was almost rape, and denied that word for many years because I didn't want to appropriate the experiences of "real" victims of assault, but I knew it was wrong, and that's why I wouldn't have been surprised by the opportunistic rape from the letter-writer being named as it was;

That there is a bonus complex narrative about the consequences of being female and kinky (reminded as I was of a friend who was raped under similar circumstances), too;

That for all that I missed out on a lot of the social expectations of femaleness (all the things women are supposed to do 'by default' when they go out because of the risk of rape are things that don't occur to me most of the time - perhaps because I'm a shut-in by preference, perhaps because I was assaulted by a supposed romantic partner and not a stranger and none of them would have protected me) I ... have no idea ... how to show this world ... to someone who does not already see the space in which it inhabits.

I often feel that I don't live in the same world as other women who are talking about the world women have to move through; that was not the case yesterday.




I'm looking at my daughter, now, and it matters that she is female-bodied whatever comes after, because I look at her and think about this world she has no idea exists, snugged as she is now in the arms of her loving family. I have the tears welling up, knowing that she will have to learn to navigate that godawful world, however it looks when she gets older, my happy, sweet child who has never known cruelty, whose sense of betrayal is keyed to a diaper left unchanged a little too long, not ... all the world can wreak.

And I wish for all the world that she could remain as sweetly unaware of the awful things that humanity will do to women as that annoying guy who wanted to know better. That her education could be as gentle as a heated conversation with a handful of frustrated women on the internet, women armed only with domestic violence stats and a fistful of personal experience.

(And I am worlds further away from understanding my mother than I have ever been.)

Offline Memory

I store my memory outside my head.

I don't know how to explain this to people, to people with undamaged memories. The only people who have understood me have had more overtly abusive relationships with one or another of their parents than I did, but they understand.

They understand growing up in 'that didn't happen', a world where any given event might disappear into an oubliette of denial and revisionist history. Where there is this constant meshwork of things never said, things said and forgotten, things said and denied a day later, where a child could not begin to navigate, caught between child's memories and the need to have faith in a caregiver.

(I think of a beloved friend's little icon, a scan of words written by a parent who never said them, a proof of something ambiguous and complicated and now, just ... unable to fit into language.)

I learned to store my memory outside my head.

Email archives, now that I'm an adult: great huge piles of email archives. Even when having conversations in text leads to vast emotional blowups, which it can do - my liege and I communicate shockingly poorly in text, for example - at least I can verify, if to nobody other than myself, that it actually happened.

Notes, mementoes, small objects that are part of an experience. I still hold a faint woundedness in my heart from when my father lost the baseball bat my grandfather gave me. I, very vaguely, wish that the scars on my forearm from when I self-injured had not faded, because scars are memory, and I know I was there, and I have no proof but what is written in my mind.

Small objects that were simply present at an experience, all part of the defining context of childhood, a thing that hooks into a complex of knowing where I came from, knowing where I was, an entire sense of security built around the familiar and the known.

"Do you need this?"

"It's a candy dish."

It's mints set out for some adult party, lights and nice clothes, something to do with artwork. It's Christmas candies by the tree in the house where I was a child, me tucked around the back of things putting ornaments on the side of the tree that faces the wall, voices singing "Haul out the Holly" from Mame. It's an assortment of pretzel sticks, once, and I cannot for the life of me remember why.

It's a little piece of memory.

"I mean, does it matter? Is it an important, like, family thing?"

I don't know how to answer the question, but since it is just a little piece of memory, not bound to a person, a single important event, something seminal, just part of where-I-came-from like so many other small things and really I don't need all of these little pieces of memory do I, there's enough else that can serve, enough that I don't just ... have my childhood dissolve away into doubt, since it is a trivial piece of memory, I say "We don't need it."

I store my memory outside my head.

Listening

And here is my response to The Adult Privilege Checklist, now.

When my mother was up visiting, she had a lot of commentary, as she will do, and one of the things she said was something scornful about Inappropriate Parent-Child Relationships, specifically that my father wanted to "give me a vote" in how family things were conducted.

I have no idea if he did this. I have no idea if she is correct that this fell into the weird dynamic he had with his mother. I have no memory of any such thing, but I don't believe I necessarily would have.

What I remember, though, is that I always felt that my father took my opinions seriously, even when he disagreed or thought that I was uninformed or not able to think things through. And I know that she thought that this was inappropriate, was "treating me like an adult", as opposed to treating me like, as I thought at the time, a person.

It frustrated me no end as a child to not be treated as a person. To know that my input was dismissable solely because of my age. I carried that resentment into my teen years, and it got sharper and more bitter when I saw adults doing things that I had never been idiot enough to do and still figuring that they knew better than me.

(I came to some sort of political consciousness during the Reagan Administration. One afternoon I drew Federal budget pie charts with made-up numbers, trying to figure out where I thought the money could go, because I was sure that I could make the budget work right. I never knew where to find the figures; if I had had the internet back then, I would probably have gone looking so I could make it work. This was naive - but it also came with this intense need to be taken seriously in my contributions, and a need to think deeply about those things that entered my awareness. Also, I was a weird, weird kid.)

I've settled into being a sort of attachment-parenty mum, and I think that's settled into the whole 'listening' thing that was what I wanted as a child. It's hard, when Little Foot wants to be held all the time, or when she's fussy and I can't figure out what's wrong, or whatever else, but I can't bear for her to feel unheard. I recognise that she didn't ask to be here, or to have a wet diaper, or to be maybe-probably-teething, or any of the other indignities of infancy, and that she has definite opinions about the world. (One of the latest appears to be "Cats are fascinating!")

And we talk a lot of theory about what's best for Little Foot. She's four months old and we talk about schooling already, and I wonder if I could bear homeschooling/unschooling/whatever her without going mad from the sheer pressure of parenthood (and look at my spiritual teacher/mentor, who likewise was not sure she could do this, but took up homeschooling her special-needs child because the school system could not serve him well). There's a maternity-and-childhood consignment store, and the gelfling (my husbands' wife) has commented we can bring kids there and say, "You get to pick one piece of clothing" or whatever, and everything is under ten bucks, and that addresses parts of the whole nonconsensuality of clothing thing. I plot out how best to raise her without my twitchinesses around food, whether it's possible to raise a child more socially ept than I am granted that I don't have skills to convey to her, and similar. I think about how to feed her, how to nurture her, how to make sure she's aware of her own self-possession. I remember the story of the little girl who snapped "SAFEWORD!" when people wouldn't stop tickling her, and think about how to teach that.

I cuddle her when she cries, which is not often, as we try to be attentive to her needs and she spends much time curled up with one parent or another. My lion currently has her downstairs bouncing on the exercise ball because she wouldn't go down to sleep and I took her last night; earlier I heard her laughing and burbling as my liege read his flash cards for school out loud to her (and apparently she was grabbing them out of his hands and putting them down in the 'done' pile, having figured out that the cards go from the pile on the left to the pile on the right in the game that Da was playing). As she grows older, she will grow broader opinions, she will think about politics and the world, she will be frustrated by, among other things, department stores and counters that are too tall to see over and shopkeepers who look past her when she has a question (to remember particularly persistent things from my own childhood).

There's a lot I can't plan for, because I don't know what she will have to say once she gets words to say it in. (Or signs. I've been doing intermittent bits of babysigns at her, though she's still too young to get it, just so there's context for her to get it from when she hits the right cognitive stage.) And I have to accept that, and remember that my first job as mama is to listen, not to force her into the space that is convenient for me to allocate.

She tells me what she needs, when I pay attention. The trick will be not breaking that.

Who Does This?

My mother invited herself up for a visit.

This isn't the funny part.

The information I had was "Sometime after Memorial Day" and "My roommate may need to be near there on June 1 if she takes that internship". To which my response was, okay then, I'll try to get my brain armorplated by that time.

So last Thursday I get an email from her saying, "Don't bother calling me, I'm heading out on Saturday to visit people!" Not a personal email, a mass mail to twenty or thirty people.

... okaaaay.

Time passes.

Monday afternoon, the phone rings, and my powerful psychic skills say, "That's my mother," and so I leave it to go to voicemail. And lo! It is my mother.

She wants to come up Wednesday and stay through Friday.

This isn't the funny part.

Wednesday: birth class. Thursday: preexisting commitment with friends.

I crack up. And explain this to my [legal] husband (I need a new title for him, this brackets thing is maddening, but I'm not going to just post treating him as my only husband dammit), and he says, "Well. That's piss-poor planning on her part."

He said that a lot Monday evening.

So I called her up Monday night. She is Very Enthusiastic and all. And then I point out the schedule issues, and she says, "... oh."

"Oh", like she's suddenly shocked into a realisation that, y'know, I have a life that exists outside the fringes of her peripheral vision.

Well, she's going to go up to Maine on the weekend to see her other brother, why not visit on the way back down?

Sure, Mom. But I'm out of the house all day Tuesday.

"Oh."

So she's driving down Sunday night, here for Monday, and going away Tuesday morning.

Oh.

Who does this?

The Dress-Up Doll

For the last few years, I have lived at an amiable distance from my mother. We had our little sweesaws (she tends to alternate between 'we have the bestest mother-daughter relationship ever, we're so close!' and 'I don't know what to do with you, you shut me out, you're so hostile' at more or less random), but for the most part managed to construct a basic irrelevance to each other. I had stopped being actively closeted from her, but was not engaging with her about basics of my life; she didn't ask, because she blatantly didn't want to know.

Then I got pregnant.

Then things got ... surreal.

Her immediate first reaction to my pregnancy was, "I get to be a grandma?!" (Compare my father's reaction: "I am pleased and terrified with you.") Followed by what I hope was a joke about taking pressure off my brother (me: married eight years, stable life situation; my brother: serious financial issues, health issues up the wazoo and no insurance, recently in new relationship). A few "that reminds me of me!" stories, with an almost accidental smattering of advice, and inappropriate disclosure about her sex life with my father.

And her first request was that I ask my husband to take a sequence of photos of my belly so that she could vicariously enjoy the experience of my pregnancy. Which I honestly barely noticed as something to remark upon before my family all responded to it with, "Isn't that kind of ... creepy?"

She sent me the most amazing wedding anniversary card - it was so amazing I brought it to show my shrink - that on the surface layer was all supportive noises, the subtext of which was, "Children will destroy your life. You'll decide it's worth it, but you've chosen to sacrifice everything for them, and they now own you. By the way, since you're my oldest kid, this was all for you, you know. Bear the burden well, and enjoy your pregnancy, because it's the last of life you get for twenty years."

I talked with her on the phone while we were in the process of picking out a prenatal medical practitioner, and there was much more "that reminds me of me!", with some follow-on "And I haven't infected you with panic recently!" about the necessity of being properly prepared for Catastrophic Hospital Births Like My Brother's.

She asked me my due date; I told her about when. She was so sad; she's a part-time art teacher, and that fell during the summer semester. So she wouldn't be able to sit by my side, you know.

I answered the phone at one point, thinking that it might be the doctor's office calling about some blood tests, and it was her. We talked about some books she was considering sending me, and various other things, and she suggested that I should imagine that she was there to rub my belly since she wasn't actually there to do it. My skin crawled off and wound up under the couch.

After that, she followed up with a "And, you know, your lifestyle is outside my comfort zone, but I really want to understand..." and I finally figured it out. The woman who was so uncomfortable with my family that she fled the room and cleaned the kitchen when I sat snuggled up to my liege on the couch, whose response to my saying my liege had recently bought a car with almost her exact criteria was to ask if my husband had any advice instead, has suddenly recognised that pretending it isn't there might cut her off from the intimate position in my life that she wants, the one where my pregnancy is all an experience where she can vicariously go through the whole parenting process without actually having to do the work parts.

I'm still not real to her, not really; I'm a vessel for whatever she wants to pour into me. The fact that I had my own life, with things she doesn't understand, was something that kept her away, up until I had something she wanted. And then there's the quick leap to those things that had been avoided for years to try to smooth it over and make our relationship something where I would be amenable to the intimacy of letting her colonise my head again.

Realising it made the package of books much easier to deal with. Not the books themselves, but the letter that came with them, which can be summarised as:

1. Here are the books I could find to send you.
   
2. I totally loved this one and looked at the pictures every day.
   
3. I'm glad to hear you're feeling better.
   
4. I felt the best I ever did in my life during my pregnancy!
   
5. I hope the position of your placenta doesn't mean you need a c-section.

I ... will admit that I just laughed.

That fear doesn't fit me. I'm not your dress-up doll.

Mother's going to make all of your nightmares come true

When I was a child, I knew that I had no privacy.

Not in the sense of constant surveillance or diary-reading (had I kept a diary). But I had nowhere to retreat to. My bedroom would be charged into, sometimes without knocking, to check on me, to see if I was behaving, to inspect me; once we moved to a house where my room had a lock, if I actually used the lock I would get screamed at. So I locked my door regularly, but ... only when nobody was around to notice, or when I could listen to hear if someone was coming. Sometimes I toggled the lock but did not close the door. My space was in regular danger of disruption. Even the insides of my head were subject to rearrangement at her whim.

One of my deepest expectations about interactions with others is that I do not have a safe retreat space. This deeply tainted my adolescent sexuality, though at least I had pre-pubescent sexuality that nobody interfered with because it's a cultural taboo to imagine that kids that age have sexualities.

(As I've developed a sense of boundaries, I've gotten touchier and touchier about people who want to co-opt my experiences and ignore my self in order to feed their own desires and narratives, which is one of the reasons Nine Deuce and her crowd's monstrous behaviour towards kinksters annoyed me so spectacularly.)

But I only ... just ... realised that I was set up.

That the positioning I have as pawn, as tool, as palimpsest for an agenda, that I fight against so damn hard, the stuff that feeds into my massive damage around privilege feminism, the stuff that leads to me thinking a lot about mechanisms of social control and how they show up, my generalised outrage at being rewritten ... was all carefully taught to me.

That maybe treating rape as normal came about because that was the lesson I was supposed to have learned.

Getting Into My Head

I hate the way she does it. The way she's able to do it.

I can get a note and have it roll off me and think how great I'm doing, how easy it is to look at that and say, "Oh look, she's pulling this trick, that trick, the other; the subtext here and here is all about how great she is, the subtext there and there is all about how horrible I am. It reads surface-level as supportive, and is completely full of undermining. Ha ha ha, how remarkable. Good thing I'm able to draw that boundary, huh?"

And then ...

... then there's the way a decision I had more or less made winds up getting ripped out from under me and turned on its head because of a totally reasonable conversation, just letting you know, and of course she would do this responsible thing rather than the thing that I was intending, and it wasn't like I told her what I was doing anyway for her to undermine, I think she just guessed, or maybe it doesn't matter and she'll do what she does without knowing anything and ....

Yeah, around and around in a giant damn loop of self-doubt and uncertainty and needing to balance what is real and what isn't, and I don't know anymore.

I'm full of hormones and full of fear and my mother is in my head again and I don't know how to get her out.

In my head in my head in my head ....

O The Embarrassment

I can't respond to this in a way that makes sense on the threads, because where I'm coming from is utterly tangential; the origin of the discussion is here and here.

One of those places that I'm ludicrously short-fused is when I run into stuff that equates submission with humiliation. I sort of touched on it obliquely when writing about language and terminology and 'name-calling' before.

I actually had a long conversation with my husband a while back trying to get an explanation of mere erotic embarassment that made any sense to me. After going back and forth for over an hour, I still didn't really see how it could work. So the best I can do is figure that other people are wired up differently from me and not think about it too hard because it makes me queasy.

Which it really does.

And I think it comes down to a place where the contrarian iron is in my spine. The short enough to be catchy but a little too short to be perfectly accurate way of putting it would be:

If I got off on being a lesser being, I'd have run back to mommy when they threw me out of school.

And it's not just the mommy issues or the failure at college thing; it's that my life has made me into someone who wants to defy shame. (And one of the things that I find powerfully attractive about my liege is his lack of shame, and lack of interest in it.)

And experience with bullies and experience with abuse means that my reaction to someone trying to twist a perceived weak spot, to humiliate, or degrade ... is cold fury. Sometimes controlled; sometimes not. I protect my vulnerable spots, and someone who wants to get me alone to twist a knife into them will run into my defenses, not get happy pervy goodness out of it.

I spent my childhood as scrawny, bookish, socially inept; my early adolescence in a maze of social abuse and sexual harassment and appropriation; my adolescence shaken by the aftermath of assault and a growing awareness of myself as Unacceptable due to my sexuality, my religion, my politics, my lack of class-appropriate ambition, my failure at higher education, my domestic focus, my mental illness. I have had enough of being treated as a defective or lesser being, well past enough.

And when she tried to coerce me back to the explosive shelter of my disintegrating parental home where I could be further humiliated and degraded, I refused. That's the key thing: I refused. I drew the line, I extracted myself from that.

I'm not going back, not to anything like that.

My happy pervy goodness comes out of being in an interaction where I am able to be whole. Not crushed into something lesser, but where my entire self, including the darker and more fragile pieces, including the parts that the outside world wants to break me of (like an impulse to service) are honored, are valuable, are precious, are holy.

Someone who thinks that my desire to be possessed and of service is a matter of humiliating me is not treating that desire with any respect, and thus becomes someone from whom that desire must be protected. Not someone who can share it.

Blood and Water

Family is a complicated thing.

It's on my mind, in a complicated interlacing of reasons, the whole shape of the thing. Bloodkin and chosen, all.

I'm thinking it over in a vast tangle of things. Thinking about a conversation a few days ago where I admitted to someone that I thought of her as a sister and she admitted reciprocation, all as tender and awkward as taking a new lover, making a mark of that. Knowing that that is real and true in a way blood isn't, can't be, at least not for the likes of us, the children of the Mother of Demons.

What is family? Is family blood, genetics; or is family what held me while I was in the depths of panicked depression on seeing the phrase "Playing with my grandchildren" in a notebook, this thing looked forward to and so deeply full of threat.

One of the most enduring ruptures in my relationship with my brother is the fact that we grew up in different families. Same parents, same household, and everything changed so fundamentally after I went away, went mad, stayed away, and in those years we were lost to each other for a while. Entire different realities lie between us, and we know it, and maybe forgive each other a little for becoming strangers.

A long time ago, when I was still semi-active in science fiction fandom, I had a massive blowout with that subculture over 'family'. I ran into a lot of people who talked about how fandom was their true family, how they felt alienated from their bloodkin, how it was a welcoming place for people like me, people who read the stuff, cared about the sorts of things fen cared about, the downtrodden nerds of the world. And it was all well and good, I suppose; I lurked on the fringes and avoided the culty-lovebombing bits of it because I had family, thanks. And then the shibboleths came out. Saying "sci-fi". Liking the occasional television show in genre. When I commented on it, I got mail from people who did costuming saying, "Yeah, looks just like the 'costuming is frivolous' argument to me. Sucks." It was, occasionally, vicious. And it ... pretty much prepared me for every subsequent "We're a welcoming group for people like you so long as you shut up about that."

I'm getting married in the spring. It wakes up all kinds of family tangles something fierce, and not just because the whole process is a familial declaration.

Who is in the real families being brought together there? Where is the line on blood and choice?

It's not a simple question. And it preoccupies me.

My Little Demon

I wasn't going to write about this. I thought I'd said everything that needed to be said at the Corvid Diaries, but it's been chewing on me, and when I saw that Trinity had posted about it at her place and at SM-F and Lina at Uncool also said a piece, I started formulating my thoughts.

I've written about wrestling with responsibility for my assault; it's a question that has been a major part of my psyche for over half a lifetime now. It's so easy to wipe it away into self-blaming, should have known better, all the things that I could have done differently if I'd been a year, a month, a few days wiser, with the wisdom that I bought with a shattered mind.

It's so easy to fall back in the place where, well, it wasn't really a rape because he stopped just shy of that, so my pain is not legitimate, my flashbacks are appropriating "real" sexual assaults. It wasn't so bad because it wasn't a stranger. It wasn't so bad because ...

It wasn't so bad because my own goddamn mother thought it was a nonevent, just something to take for granted: of course he assaulted me, he's a man and all, that's what men do. I shouldn't expect anything different; it was a nonevent.

I had to fight the demons of guilt and shame to accept it as an event.

I had to fight the world for my right to have been hurt.

I had to fight myself, the world, everything, for recognition of the fact that my sexuality was folded around nonconsent like a car wrapped around a tree by a drunk before I was old enough to know, fully, what it was.

I had to fight to be able to say: this thing happened to me. This was real. I was hurt by it. It was not my fault. In fact, it was his fault, his choice, his decision to never ask, never realise he was pushing, that he was doing harm. And I am far more forgiving of what he did than anyone I've told the story to, still, and even I know that it was his damn fault that he assaulted me, pinning me down under his naked bodyweight while I tried to curl into a ball of adolescent neutronium.

I fought. And I won that fight. I won that fight primarily with the help of a woman I traded stories with, sitting on the floor in her house in Wales one summer night talking about where we had been and what we had seen. I won that fight with the support of my husband. I won that fight with the guidance of the outraged responses to the story that so many people have given me, letting me know that my event was a real event, something that I was allowed to be affected by.

And now I run across someone saying "All men are rapists." (I'm not inclined to chase down the link enough to link that thing there, because I don't feel like retraumatising myself. If you want to read it, the posts I linked above linked it.)

And that throws me back to fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, unable to talk about it, because my experience wasn't actually real, it was "just" an assault, and anyway it was my boyfriend, not some stranger. It throws me back to knowing that, anyway, it was my fault, I should have known that he'd try something, I shouldn't have gone over to watch a movie if I didn't expect that. It's back to being all my fault, not his responsibility, because that's just how men are, that's just the default setting, he shouldn't be expected to be a decent human being.

All my fault.

All my goddamn fault.

It throws me back there, in the whirling mess of adolescence and trauma, back when I was still flashbacking regularly, back when I couldn't face the pain because being in pain was degrading to people who'd had a "real" assault.

All my fault.

And I sit back and bare my teeth at that maelstrom and say, "No."

I fought that fight already, and I won, and no fleabitten RAPE APOLOGIST claiming to be a feminist will EVER take that away from me.

Is that fucking radical enough for you?

How I Horrified The Shrink

It was probably a couple of months after I broke up with my first boyfriend, the one who assaulted me. Maybe a year after, the following summer, I mean. I was still a little shellshocked about it all, was wanting to talk about it with someone, was finally coming into a place where maybe I could. It was a bright, sunny day; I remember the light coming in through the windows.

I was old enough to not trust my mother with information right out, but not so old that I didn't try to hope she might turn somehow motherly if I gave her the chance. And I can't remember the context of the conversation, whether we were having some dispute, whether I brought it up out of the blue, any of that.

I asked her, "Did you ever wonder why [the ex] never calls anymore?" I think it was relevant to the conversation, or something.

She shrugged. "I figured he'd forced himself on you," like it was just something to shrug about, like it was normal, expected, something completely unworthy of comment.

I had no idea how to deal with someone who thought I had been raped and could not bring herself to care.

I fled.

Tell It To Me Straight

So I continue with this therapy dealie. This past session was spent largely on stories about my mother, at least one of which visibly horrified the shrink. (I may not have told that one here. I'll tell it another time.)

One of the ones I told was when I learned I couldn't trust her. Which ... what almost horrifies me now as an adult was that I knew this from the age of seven or eight or so, whenever this story happened, and yet I kept trying. Kept offering her things to break to see if she was going to break them again, like she always did. Kept giving her opportunities and being hurt when it didn't work out well. (And the shrink says that that sort of faith is good and human, but that doesn't make it not feel like a horror movie in retrospect -- don't open that door, you know the monster is behind that door, can't you hear the cellists?)

Anyway. At seven or eight I was seriously considering running away from home. I planned it thoroughly, in the oddly myopic way that kids do things -- I didn't have plans on where to go, I figured I'd go to a friend's house and work from there, but I had charts and diagrams and lists and things plotted out in where I'd put my stuff in the little red wagon -- money in a particular corner under other things so nobody would steal it, this much space for clothes, these critical stuffed animals, and so on. Twenty or so pages of notes about this -- I was a meticulous kid about that sort of thing.

And in a fit of, I don't know, generosity or weakness or something, I confessed to my mother that I'd been thinking of this. And she comforted me, patted me, made all the right there-there-dear noises, and I thought that maybe I wouldn't need those pieces of paper after all, all those carefully laid plans.

That night at about eleven I decided I needed a drink, and crept downstairs to get one from the kitchen. I overheard my parents talking in the living room -- or rather, my mother declaiming and my father grunting. I slipped up towards the edge of the door to listen, and heard, in vicious, dismissing, sneering tones, "... gave me this bullshit about running away ..."

I stood there, shocked to the bone, and I don't remember anything else of the conversation. I considered, fleetingly, bursting in on them, defending myself; considered getting the evidence of all my planning and presenting it as proof; considered just vanishing that night, I think, or the next day, to show her. And then I crept back upstairs, full of the shock of my mother's support and gentleness being a veneer over that contempt, too afraid to make a noise of getting a drink and getting caught having potentially heard that savagery. If she had that much hatred in her when she thought I didn't know, what would she do if she thought I knew? What would she do if she knew I caught her lying to me, expressing care and sympathy, pretending to be a friend, while she harbored that level of disgust for what I confided?

It's one of those things that has reverberations down the line, echoing in the cavernous hollows of the spaces between people. I am not put at ease by the 'polite social lie', but rather quite the contrary; I also deflect the question rather than speak untruth, if answering it truthfully would be inappropriate. (I honestly have no idea whether this is related to my decision at about the same age to stop lying. They aren't related in my memory, but.) I am not capable of considering the misdirecting social corner-padding a kindness; it's just another way for me to doubt my senses, for me to find a reason to mistrust.

My liege and I had something of a fight this week, because he had the basic respect for me to tell it to me straight. And then we went and we damn well fixed it, because all the parts were laid out mostly in the clear. Which reminds me of back early on in our relationship, when I anxiously told him I had a temper and might blow up under stress, and got the response, "Good. Then we will fight efficiently." It was very efficient; he even held me for some of it, the bit where I got lost in the old mommy-issues tangle of what is real, whether memory can mean anything, all of that mess that's why I can't handle the pretending. Keeping the truth straight is plenty hard enough.

Sufficiently Advanced Coping Mechanisms Are Indistinguishable From Sanity

A week ago today, I hit rock bottom and bounced.

I had a conversation with my husband about a communication glitch that was really unnerving me, which unearthed a whole bunch of tangled mess involved with my sense of overwhelming failure. That combined poorly with some ongoing stressors in my relationship with my liege and my ongoing state of somewhat questionable health.

Complete meltdown. Levels of shaking madness I haven't had for years, level of crazed. Crawled into bed with my husband and sobbed myself sick over what a terrible partner I think I've been to him, was not consoleable with his belief that I'm not as bad as all that.

The next day I dropped a note to a friend who highly recommended her shrink asking for contact information. The day after I called said shrink. By Friday afternoon, I had an appointment for a week later.

I've been muttering that I need a shrink for years. And there was always a reason I didn't get one. Hadn't gotten around to it. Hate making phone calls. We're moving, I don't have the time. Settling into the new place, which doesn't have decent public transit. Learning how to drive.

We're not getting a second vehicle any time soon. I'm not getting my license soon, either; I haven't been getting the practice in because I don't trust me on the road at the best of times, and certainly not when I'm shaking from stress already. Transportation is not getting easier, and I am not getting any saner.

I am tired of feeling crazy.

So I have this appointment. And I'm rehearsing in my head what I need to say, trying to build it up into enough of a rehearsed speech or something that I won't do what I've done in the past with shrinks, pull up the protective shell, not say anything important. Hoopjump to get through it and never show a vulnerability. That won't get me out of here. And I want the hell out.

I want to know what I should expect myself to be able to do. I seesaw wildly between feeling completely incapable of action and feeling that any failure to accomplish is a wicked and morally culpable slacking off, and I have no idea what a normal, unimpaired person should be able to do, let alone what is reasonable to expect of me. Where on the spectrum between "suck it up and stop whining" and "anything you accomplish in this state of damage is pretty much bonus" do I actually fall? I have no idea. I talk about things that I consider minor, not comparable to people with real problems, and get responses of, "That seems like a big deal to me", and I just don't know. Am I describing it inaccurately, or do I just have no acquaintance with normal, or what?

I want to work through the issues of having a probably-Borderline parent, speaking of 'no acquaintance with normal', want to know how to build a sensical sort of reality for myself. I want to know what of the damage done to me can be repaired, and how much I just need to build compensations for, brace my brain with structures so that I can handle the world.

I want to dismantle the complex of damage that leaves me feeling like a catastrophic failure as a wife, with its roots in lasting damage from the assault, poor depression management, some reality issues. I want to know how much of the lingering assault damage is mendable. I want better coping mechanisms for all these mind-processing defects. I want, maybe, to know what a normal cognition might look like, and what direction I need to shove myself in to approximate it.

I want to be okay.

I'm tired of being crazy.

Hanging

We finally got the stuff cleared out of the hall so we could hang the painting that goes there. It's my favorite of everything my mother has done -- rich in blues and greens and purples and silver, which are my colours, which are her colours. Abstract and evocative, the pointed arch of the church door, the clear blue sky, light through the branches of the trees like light through the stained glass of the wheeling circular windows of the cathedral. Leaves fall.

I've closed the door to the Pink Room so the reflected sunlight doesn't change its colour palette, and I sit and watch the painting as the sun comes and goes, sometimes clear in its full intricacy, sometimes so lost in shadow that the only thing visible is the light blue through the church door.

She finished that painting the night before her own mother's funeral, so rich with depth and meaning and the echoes of generations.

It is so beautiful.

Do you see what I hear?

Since I'm spending this week in a state of stressed, a litle emotionally unstable, and feeling slightly unreal, I might as well take a little time to write about my mother some more.

This is another one of those iconic fight moments, where all the context is gone as irrelevant, but there's this one crystalline statement that just stuck in my head like shrapnel. This time, the statement was:

"Your father treats you like an adult."

I was probably fifteen at the time, ish? And being fifteen, my (unspoken, because I knew better than to say it) response was something like, "And that's why I actually like him."

From, y'know, twice that age, I think it was more a case of ... my father treats me like a person. Someone who might not have experience, knowledge, accumulated wisdom, to alays make good decisions, but did have some right to have input and opinions. But that was my first clear, if only half-articulated at the time, recognition of the pain of not existing as yourself -- there was this whole undercurrent to that fight about whether or not I was human enough to make decisions for myself.

Whether or not I was real.

Today, I'm feeling slightly unreal, a little sort of ... above and behind reality, watching myself watch things, my proprioception not quite synched up with my motions. It's a familiar old feeling, probably one of those things that author Jo Walton once commented, "The hardest thing to put down is a shield you no longer need" about, a way of dealing with a world in which asserting my reality was met with that sort of dismissal, that sort of ... you are an object, you are not someone with opinions, with independent self to assert. You are a pawn. You serve rather than exist.

Asserting reality, speaking its name, has always been so important to me; so much fighting against this constant pressure to be Other, to be normal, to be an extension of my mother or any of a number of other things, so much that I need to dig my heels in against and say, "No. I am, and I am this." Writing letters from Gehenna, where they look at the world from an angle.

ειμι ειμι ειμι