Once Upon A Time

Sometime, a lifetime ago, I was severely depressive.

I know, I know, a big shocker that.

But one of the things that happened with that depressive episode is, basically: I never fully recovered from it.  I spent a lot of time denying that, and it didn't do a whole hell of a lot of good, because it wasn't actually true.

(Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it.)

Life has changed a lot from the late nineties.  I am not sure I entirely recognise who I was then.  It's a complicated old world, and a lot has happened between then and now.  But there are scars.

I'm a whole lot healthier, in so many ways.  Having an assortment of medical conditions that can be treated with pills and potions treated with those pills and potions can do a lot for sheer physical resilience.  The kids don't seem as heavy as they used to, even.  (Well, Little Foot feels like she weighs about a fucking ton, but she's a big kid, and it's a smaller fucking ton than it used to be?  Dunno.)

Maybe I can dig back enough to unearth those old wounds and try to heal them true this time.

Maybe I can forgive myself for who I used to be.  And for the years of denying that it mattered.

(That's always a tough one.)

Just pinged a therapist.  We'll see if she works out, eh?  Or I can try another.  But inertia is the thing, and I kicked inertia by writing the one.  (I still like my old therapist but I have moved further and further away from her, and with the kids the transit is just unworkable.  I would like to drop by and see her sometime, introduce Little Foot, but when the fuck am I anywhere near Brookline?  Never.)

The Illusion of Able-Bodiedness

Right now, I really want to be able to pretend to be able-bodied again.

I have spent much of my life getting good at pretending.  It meant that my incapacities were moral failings rather than concerns of health, sure, but somehow it's easier to be a failure than to wrestle with actual embodiment, and living in a body that in subtle, quiet ways fails to serve what I want to do with it.

(But in the spiritual process that comes of needing to sharply start shedding those comfortable lies, the comfort goes along with the lies....)

What brings this to a head, of course, is the way treatment brings health into a sharp relief.  If I can take a pill and be more energetic, more functional, stronger, more competent... then all the structural incompetence is something that can't stand, and I have to replace it with something else.

If I manage to put trust in numbers when I could not put trust in myself, and the numbers not only reveal my autoimmune problem but other deficiencies in my chemistry, then I cannot ... not honestly ... say that one set of numbers validates me and the other does not.

Even if it would be nice, when the treatment for the other set of numbers makes me frail and helpless and trembling and unable to stabilise my emotional state, to say "I don't believe in this" and throw it aside.  Because I looked up the problem, and it had things like risks of permanent neurological damage, and even if I don't believe in the dualism and even if I don't know how to comfortably be in my body my mind, I was using that thing, okay?

Being angry is getting me through it.  It gives me enough strength to keep from collapse.  Maybe not the best of solutions but for the lack of anything else that works I will just keep at that.  I can be angry at the loss of my illusions, here, even if many of them were illusions that I was worthless, that I was just as free to act and be and do what I dreamed in the world as anyone else.

I spent time working on, wrestling with, fighting my way to a place where I could work on embodiment, on not drifting up into the realms of the theoretical and the mind.  This is a thing that's part of my training in my Craft work, something that I need to do to be effective in reality, and as I get deep into this work, deep deep in, my body's frailty catches me and I am caught in this deep, penetrating weakness.  And because I can't just stop what I'm doing, pop up into the realm of the mind, for so many reasons, I have to face my way through what it is to be embodied in a body that ... is like this one.

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.)

W is for White Elephants

(Yeah, I am totally bouncing around in this thing and not getting a damn thing done on time.  Life exploded in the summer and I'm still putting together the pieces.  Here's one I'm gonna pretend is on time, ish, rather than spur-of-the-moment topical!)

A number of years ago, my aunt gave me a pair of porcelain elephants for Christmas.  I was never entirely certain what to make of this, to be honest - my family is certainly down with the snarky jokes - but I've moved the white elephants around with me because that is, of course, what one does with white elephants.  Never quite sure what to do with them.

Take that as a little frame story.  I'll get back to the elephants in a little bit.

A couple of weekends ago, I was at a religious retreat.  I'm not going to go into a whole hell of a lot of detail about this, but suffice it to say that I had a major life-transforming experience and have been spending the last few weeks figuring out how to put the pieces back together.

And one of the things that I've been working on is figuring out how to better actually deal with the whole self-respect dealie, which (between various things well-chronicled in the archives) is not one of my better skills.  And it's an important thing to do, and to actually make space for, and it's something that will reliably slip out of my grasp as soon as I have any stress in my life at all, at least going by my track record.

Now, one of the topics we discussed at retreat was time, and having a healthy relationship with time.  And the idea was raised: build an altar or shrine to time, make offerings, make prayers, deal with this Power as any other god or godling and see if being polite to it helps.

And while I have issues with time, they are nothing at all compared to my issues with self.

So I - while putting my room back together after the various crises that made me have to take it apart - decided to put up a me shrine.  Partly recognising what I have, in fact, done, partly aspirational.  I'm riffing on some chaos magic that my liege and I talked about years ago, the idea of writing up a character sheet for now and figuring out where to spend the points and how to get to the skillset that one wants to have on one's character sheet, and so on.  Make a space for it.

So I dedicated a shelf on the bookcase I was shelving tonight to this little project.  I unrolled a scroll of Ma'at that I'd never had a home for (indicative of something, for sure) and set it up so the shelves themselves hold Her in place.  Some tools I use for magical self-maintenance can go up there, sure; all the books I contributed to (or wrote) on one side of the shelf to remind me of real accomplishment; the weird black heart a friend gave me; my Lilith icon, since She's certainly one for demanding a bit of fucking self-respect ... and I propped the corners of it all with those two white elephants.

You see, white elephants, they have a bit of a troubled reputation, because they're those things you can't get rid of.  That's the idiom - nobody wants them, they kick around as tchotchkes forever, what have you.

But back it up a little.  The white elephant is particularly sacred and holy.  Being given a white elephant is an extreme honor, being given the caretaking of something so precious and rare.

Yes, it's high-maintenance taking care of a me.  But it's nonetheless a sacred trust.

On "Women's Mysteries"

A lot of people have written about the various happenings at PantheaCon recently, where, again, the question of cis-separatist women's rituals has come up. And in and among all the things about which women get into which spaces and all that, there's something that doesn't go unquestioned: the idea that there exists a "women's mysteries" dependent on cis bodies and associated with menstruation, and that this can be referred to as "women's mysteries" and somehow, magically, everyone will know what it is.

Well, y'know, the only mystery involving menstruation I care about is why it's so unspeakably horrible.

If I were to accidentally stumble into such a ritual because people were too shy about their body stuff to actually mention what they were focusing on, that would be kind of a mess for me. I'm not up for celebrating this particular vile experience, particularly not with people who are overjoyed by it. The Mirena is my favorite cybernetic upgrade ever, because it means it basically goes away.

I don't want the mysteries of my body to be reduced down to something I find unspeakably awful.

I mean. Even with my moods levelled out a whole hell of a lot, I spent the weekend recently hating myself, hating my body, filled with moderate dysphoria and dissociation, and generally kind of fucked up. Why? Because I was having a menstrual cycle. Eventually my liege stabbed me in the knees, which at least reset my equilibrium a bit. It was genuinely a horrible experience, and one I hope not to repeat.

And that's without the usual side-effects - the tremendous pain, for example. The serious emotional lability and not in good directions. The sensation of sweating filth out of every pore, like the endgame of having the flu - the sort of vile sense of contagion that requires doing a lot of time in the shower to have a hope of feeling clean. (And yes, yes, I know, Teh Patriarchee treats menstruation as unclean! But really, the whole 'no really, I need a bath' thing is not manufactured out of social pressure.)

If someone assumes that a cissexual woman is welcome and appropriate at their menstruation ritual, well...

... I exist.

Define your fucking terms. Don't call your menstruation celebrations women's rituals, because not all the women you might *want* to bring in want to fucking be there.

Unsaid Things

In the comments on this post on Figleaf's, Clarisse Thorn posted a link to this post, in the comments to which there was a fair amount of discussion of, basically, the whole "well, kink comes from abuse", that's in part fed by stories in which people link their kink with their childhood abuse experiences.

And of course there was the usual, "No, actually, I wasn't raped/molested/abused, so my kink doesn't come from rape/molestation/abuse" stuff in there, but here's a thing that I don't think people talk about.

I was the victim of attempted rape.

My emotional response to that left me reluctant to trust people in sexual situations, extremely cautious, unlikely to seek out new partners, and basically extremely sexually conservative, a trait that, believe it or not, has persisted for the following eighteen years.

So there exists, in at least one case (and you know by Ugol's Law there are more, even if you don't know that some of that "more" have been in my comments in the past) a link between highly risk-averse non-promiscuous sexual behaviour and sexual assault.

But, you know, you don't see a lot of "Sexual assault causes sexual conservatism" stories. Because my sort of low partner count and wariness to get involved with people is a desired outcome, after all, so the default social response to it is more likely to go in the "Well, uh, good for you" then than to consider my preferences the sort of problematic that makes a crashing good tale. (Though I have run into a couple of assholes who were of the opinion that I should try some sort of desensitisation therapy - read, have a lot of casual sex - in order to burn out my sensitivity to sex so that I might consider fucking them. There's a whole lot of wrong there, to say the least.)

And as I think about this, I think about one of my little political bits of Discordian ju-jutsu around orientation. A while back I was regularly running into people who would say something to the effect of, "I never hear straight people saying they knew about their attractions before puberty, so gay people who say that must have had inappropriate sexualisation as children." I have, at times, taken some glee in pointing out to these people that I had my first crush at the age of seven or eight, and was quite aware of it as linked to "grown-up stuff" that I would figure out later, and that I am painfully straight. Somehow, they had managed to fail to register my perfectly ordinary and very common story - the elementary school crush, for crying out loud, have they never heard of Judy Blume? - as being relevant to the question of whether ordinary and very common children have any connection to the concept of attraction.

(I so much marvelled at these people for their ignorance of the constant threads of heterosexuality that is imposed on children - when a mixed-sex pair of children starts rough-housing, the declarations of puppy love, for example. Or the creation of gender-segregated classrooms where associating with the Other Side is fraught and charged with inexplicable but oddly adult tension - I can recall my crush standing on the far side of the fifth-grade classroom, talking with another boy, on the far side of the uncrossable gender line, where it would take a braver girlchild than I was to venture.)

How many perfectly ordinary stories do we forget to hear? Because the perfectly ordinary flows so seamlessly into the world that we want to know that it vanishes, invisible, like so many lines in the game of cognitive Tetris, racking up the points for what we think we know but disappearing into the imaginary as soon as we register them. How many perfectly ordinary stories don't register in our mental statistics because their mundanity - the puppy love, the losing adventurousness due to a trauma, the marriage that doesn't end, the kid who never causes trouble in school, the high school athlete who doesn't join the big leagues and make millions of dollars, the brilliant mind who doesn't cure cancer after all - makes no impression?

How many stories do we just not hear?

(ETA: Here's another relevant link to a story we don't hear, explicitly talking about the stories we expect instead, even!)

Keeping Abreast of the Subject

I'm not sure I have anything to say on this Shapely Prose guest post about experiences with fluctuating breast size that isn't kind of tangential of the subject, so I'm pulling my ruminations back here.

When I was thirteen or fourteen, I started to enter puberty.

This was, as you might be aware, a touch on the late side. (Further, I was in high school, due to getting skipped up a grade, and thus that much further out of synch with people whose physical development had started, typically, two or three years earlier.) And, as longer-term readers may recall, I was not well-positioned for good social skills development especially around sexuality, nor particularly ept at it.

I had been sexualised and objectified prior to that point; one of the driving forces behind my schooling decisions for high school was wanting to avoid any further exposure to the boys who had made an avocation of attempting to grope my undeveloped breasts or taunt me with sexually charged commentary. But the actual physical stuff didn't really start to kick in significantly until I was actually in high school.

The androgyny of childhood gave way to an androgyny of early adolescence, one too lean and light-boned to show any of the broad paintstrokes of womanhood, with bare hints of the swelling of breasts. I learned how to change shirts in the gym locker room without ever quite seeming to be topless in the selfconsciousness of knowing that I was braless, puerile, exposed. My mother harassed me to wear a bra despite the fact that I had the barest suggestions of curves, and I humored her for two or three days before discarding the thing as an uncomfortable mass of useless fabric.

Despite all this, I was bemused by notions that I should want larger breasts; the pectoral workout scenes in Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret left me laughing at the strange implausibility of adolescent females rather than reassured that I was not alone. I did not think larger breasts would make me attractive; attractiveness was such an unreachable goal that such physical transformations did not occur to me. I hardly thought about breasts at all, beyond a near-subliminal discomfort with a sense of sexualisation and exposure that came of admitting to having them - a discomfort that was eased by the fact that, compared to most female people I knew, I didn't have them.

It was strange to me to hear discussions of breasts (and bras, and similar), because I was ... not precisely dissociated from mine, but had them as tightly associated with my identity as my kneecaps. And so I missed out a lot of importance and had a rather funhouse-mirror perspective on a lot of things, a perspective that perhaps matched the lopsidedness of my actual breasts. (One of which, I have joked for years, never made it out of Tanner stage 4.) Perhaps this was rooted in or a root of my later understanding of myself as genderqueer; gods know.

I picked up a few sports bras from a friend a few years ago, not because I needed sports-bra support of the breasts, but because there were times that going shirtless for exercise was too cold and a shirt led to overheating, so half a shirt was the right scale. They ached some at certain points of my menstrual cycle. My partners found my nipples notably more interesting than I did, overall (experiments with things to do with them mostly led to me wondering when something worthwhile was going to begin). And so on.

All of which made pregnancy ... interesting.

There are stretchmarks on my breasts to go with the stretchmarks on my belly and thighs. I wear a nursing bra most days as much for support as for the protection on my nipples when they've been moderately abraded. The larger one actually folds over, which is frustrating for finding positions to lie down. There is an actual curve between them where there used to be a breastbone; it's possible to imagine corsetry giving me cleavage without me having to put one hand on the side of each boob and shove them together (which was the prior methodology for achieving 'cleavage').

It's honestly a bit confusing. My lion commented that some of the photography of me with the baby suggested a curve, and I was very much, "Yes, it's so weird." Not weird enough to be dysphoric, at least, just perplexing and faintly off-kilter.

And I'm again reminded of the person over at Renegade Evolution's who was horrified by people not wearing bras because People Can See Your Nipples, which left me in a bewildered, "Don't you wear clothes where you come from?" sort of state. Which has to be linked with my mother's insistence that there was some moral necessity to clothe my barely-adolescent chest in additional totally unnecessary layers, somewhere, in the department of socially normal things that make no sense to me.

It's a horribly fraught subject and one where my investment is minute, which is a fascinating experience.


None of this is anything I know how to talk about in a way that's relevant for Shapely Prose, honestly; I'm pretty sure I didn't quite talk about what I meant to when I started here, either. Just ... all the investment people have in breasts, I guess, and I'm limited to faint aggravation at unnecessary clothing and preferring it when I don't get kicked in them.

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.

Dreamlife

When I was a child and trying to get to sleep, I would tell myself little fantasy stories all about the boy I fancied and how in a fantasy world he needed to be rescued and afterwards we would live happily ever after.

When I got a little older, I got uncomfortable with that because what if he didn't want me, so I would tell myself little fantasy stories that were only mostly about the boy I fancied and how ... etc.

When I got a little older, I built raw fantasy out of my kinks to soothe myself to sleep, with intricate gearwork constructions of bondage, domination, and service.

Once I had a sexual partner, I would assemble bits and pieces of fantasies out of things we'd done and extrapolations thereof.

Often, these would be kinked, playing with ideas, coming up with scenarios and notions.


... now, when I am trying to get to sleep, my mind is full of baby smiles. And holding her close, cradling her in my arms, and actually having the strength to not have to let go, back away, get a little space, and breathe so that I do not lose my mind. Actually having the infinite patience that is back behind the archetype, being able to pour all the love into her that she can hold.


I honestly find it more than a bit confusing.

And I would miss the sex dreams, if I had space left in my mind to have them.

Unwritten Letters

Dear ____________,

You don't know me. We met in passing at your son's first wedding; you asked something about the logistics while I was setting up the centrepieces on the reception tables, I answered you, and when I was done with my task I fled to the bride's room to hide from you. I'm sure you figured out that I was his lover when they insisted on taking photographs that included me (as well as my husband) over your objections. I'm sure that it was not lost on you that we helped clean up the place as if we were part of the basic logistics, not merely guests, and were the ones who said the last goodbyes as all the wedding guests drifted away.

There was a time you liked the idea of me, wanted to meet me - back when you thought of me as a human being. A fellow potter, perhaps, or someone who could provide useful advice. Someone who was important to your son, yes, and I suppose that was a part of why you said you were looking forward to the opportunity.

I have this thing, though, that I won't meet people under false pretences if I can possibly avoid it. I most particularly will not step under their roof with the expectation that I will be lying to them, and pretending to be anything other than his partner would be a deception. I have a particular sense of hallpeace that I will not be so easily brought to violate; it would be an insult and a dishonor to my host were I to do so.

I know that I stopped being a person to you as soon as you knew. I was no longer someone with a set of shared interests, someone who was a major presence in your son's life; I was a symbol of so many things gone wrong, and that symbol overwhelmed any human fellowship we might have had.

I know and understand that you were hurt badly and betrayed by a partner who was unfaithful to you. I wish I could tell you that I will not betray your son and be heard, or that his devotion to me was not a betrayal of his legal spouse. I do not know how to mend this at all, or even if it is mendable; it is certainly not anything I can touch, because you have made me your enemy whether I will it or not.

There is nobody in the world beyond my immediate family whose recognition matters more to me than yours; nobody I want more to acknowledge me as his wife. I think that you are one of the people who has mattered to him most in the world, which means your regard matters to me. It might be better for me if I could dismiss it as a matter of insignificance, but that is not within my power. I am vulnerable to you; I cannot say I like it, but I acknowledge it and accept it. My dedication to your son means that you have that gut shot available to you, and that is okay.

When he and I got married, we had long, long talks about who to invite. We brought in our community as witnesses, because marriage is a thing about community. I invited my father and my brother. He wound up inviting no relatives, because he could not expect you to understand. I know how much it meant to me to have my father there, especially recognising that he is not perfectly comfortable with the structure of my family. I wish we could have opened our ceremony to include you.

I wish I could spare him the pain of all this. Or at least that I could set my own pain and anxiousness aside and just hold him rather than be plagued with tearing weakness that means that he must comfort me instead of the other way around. Every time you and he talk, I see his pain and frustration, not just at your refusal to see me or your refusal to see him, but at losing you. I wish things were different, that he did not feel forced into a choice between his mother and his wife, that ... I just wish things were different.

I wish I could talk to you and put it right, never mind that what is wrong is in a place I could not touch if I tried. There is a part of me that fervently believes that if you could see us, spend a little time with us, get to know us and our family, that you might come to forgive us for not being the white picket fence family you wanted your son to have. I know this is a fantasy, a little dream world that I spin to make it seem like this could possibly be under my control and thus something I could fix, something that could fall into a realm I could affect. Something that I could change, make better. Something that I could heal.

I know that I cannot, and it may never be better, never be different. Which is why, while I may write you letters in my mind, I cannot send them.

Where Everybody Knows Your Alias

Dianne Sylvan wrote recently at her Dancing Down the Moon about feeling alienated, isolated, or separated from the overall pagan community, and I sort of want to write about that (to the best of my current somewhat frazzled ability).

I feel, more often than not, very complicated about 'pagan community'. In ways that often remind me of my nasty breakup with science fiction fandom, more than anything else: the sense of "This is a space built for people like you, so long as 'people like you' is appropriately edited for content", the sense of "Let's bond over all this stuff we have in common (without noticing when we don't actually have any of this stuff in common)."

Like the person who commented recently that sexual domination has no place in paganism, because that shit is evil, yo. (And the people who followed up on that with, more or less, 'How can you be so nasty to people who are into BDSM? It's not like it's rape fantasies!' didn't exactly help with that, even though that's not one of my things.) Or, more benignly, all of the people talking about the autumn equinox, what are you doing, tell me about your plans, introduce me to this festival, and it's not my fucking festival and even though I accept the genero-pagan wheelyear as really damn popular and that people aren't asking me specifically what I'm doing for Someone Else's Bloody Holiday, I am, for one reason or another, just tired and touchy about it. Or a recent "How can we update the triple goddess concept to suit more people?" Or whatever.

So when I look at public-sphere paganism I see, well, I see:

Mother goddess and Her horned heterocentric consort, in a circle, on the sabbats or by moonphases, spellcasting, Greek-derived ceremonial magic elements, eco-religion as dogma, sexuality is sacred but not any of that pain blood domination stuff, an it harm none, not a Satanist you know, everyone is a priest, and so on. Let us meditate on nothing whatever substantial and then do a spiral dance.

None of this connects to me, seeing as I'm a full-up polytheist who hasn't gotten the work done to sort out her goddamn liturgical calendar aside from the 'hey, someone's got a holiday, I can handle an excuse for a party' level, not much for the magical foo as commonly done and overall over my attempt to categorise everything by classical element, too genderqueer and kinky for a nice sex ritual, not overly hung up on being nice, possibly technically a Satanist in some interestingly askew ways, cranky about being shoved into a priestly role inappropriately by idiots, and so on.

Which means that, in the overwhelming majority of public pagan spaces, I feel like an idiot.

Feeling like an idiot is not conducive to meaningful religious experience.

I'm entirely capable of going to Someone Else's Religious Ritual and having a meaningful experience, mind. I did it all through my going-to-church childhood; I have decent odds of pulling it off when I attend PantheaCon; in a lot of ways, my own religious practice group is built around making meaningful Someone Else's Religious Ritual for all parties present, not pushing anyone notably further out of their comfort zone than anyone else. But this sense of specifically-for-someone-else-that-they-assume-is-me feeling is a bloody mess. PCon is deliberately a kind of religious smorgasboard anyway, and I approach it as such.

I'm left with this sense of "What the hell do I do here?", mostly, in it all. Because the public stuff is so unsatisfying - and it was unsatisfying even before I settled into my current religious orientations. But there's no space for people like me to do our thing (even if people-like-me, by which I mean me, as I'm the only one doing my particular thing really, had our shit together to be able to pull off a public thang if we wanted to), because the cast-your-circle, invite-your-pair-of-sex-differentiated-deities, do-your-spell, be-happy-and-have-cake stuff is so fucking normative that one can get screamed at for a, "Sorry, I can't help you, it's not my holiday" let alone actually showing some reality.

So people like me stop showing up.

And apparently people like Dianne Sylvan, who's actually published books about Wicca and thus presumably had some greater personal stake in Wicca-like religion than I do, stop showing up too.

Who the hell shows up anymore?

It's a real problem.

On Demand

This is going to be damned hard to write, okay, so I'm going to start out asking you to bear with me here. I've been trying to write it on and off for a couple of weeks, and have made not so much with the headway, so ... yeah. (Some of the wanting to write is wanting to try to untangle what's in my head so maybe it can get better, too, which makes the frustrated inability to articulate even more aggravating.)

I think I'm gonna try being blunt rather than getting the nuance right to start out with, because hitting the precise spot is more energy than I've got. Again, bear with me, I'm navigating the shoals here.

Motherhood has completely fucked up my d/s.

Not in the way one might expect from the cultural pressure stuff, the whole "Now that I am a Real Adult, I must put aside these Foolish Things Of My Youth" bullshit.

Here's the thing.

Okay, here are the multiple things.

The first one is a general new-parent thing, I think. It's amazing how much of my life just drops into Little Foot's adorable orbit. Even aside from the time I invest in caring for her, holding her is one of these simple joys that persists. (And I'm constantly torn between wanting to hold her when I'm good and happy with it and knowing that I'm fully capable of burning myself out emotionally on overcontact, and trying to balance the "I must hold my kid" with the "If I don't have someone else hold her right now I'm going to go totally fucking batshit.") I have amazing levels of help - not just that Little Foot has a four-parent family, but also miscellaneous parents and friends coming by - my dad's been here most recently and taking a lot of Sitting Down Under The Baby duty, for example. I know I would not be functioning terribly well without that help.

And at the same time, I feel horrifyingly alone. Because all this energy goes to helping-me-with-the-baby, not helping-me, and ... I've been articulating to the husbands a bit that I have a snuggle shortage. It's helping a little, to sit with my lion and lean on him for a while, or my liege coming up and just ... talking with me for a bit before he heads off to class. That's getting me back trending at least not away from sane. But there's this increasing level of awful neediness in me, and I don't know what to do about it, and I have to balance it with the fact that Little Foot is much more fragile than I am and less capable of taking care of her own needs, to understate a smidge.

And there's another thing. It doesn't matter how hard I kink for service stuff, I am 24/7 on call for a master who is nothing but demanding and has essential claims on use of portions of my body. This is exhausting. And it doesn't leave me much flexibility for more negotiated service, either; it's hard not to meet a request with snappishness, not because I resent the request, but because, say, an afternoon of Grunty McFusspot and her pants-related events or her habit of shaking my nipple like a terrier who's finally gotten a grip on a long-pursued rat does not leave me feeling generous and full of warm, giving spirit. Which is not a get-out-of-commitments free situation by any means, but it does add a layer of stress to the whole experience.

So while I'm needing care and support - and would truly love to have some of the protective restorative energy that some of the d/s we do affords me - I wind up feeling like I have nothing to offer right now. Enthusiastic service is a bit rough. I can fetch tea, so long as I'm not Sitting Down Under The Baby, and that's about what I'm up for. And I have a hard time asking for things, even as I recognise that I have standing orders to do so, especially when I don't feel I have anything to balance the scales with.

It of course does not help that I had twelve stitches put in my chassis, and while that appears to have healed up, I have a ridge of scar tissue running up one side of certain rather sensitive bits of anatomy (a direction I rather prefer than down the perineum proper, but nonetheless it has its inconveniences) and my lochia is only now appearing to resolve itself. Sexual frustration has surfaced occasionally, and often gone in really awfully messy dissociative direction, because - again - for all that I enjoy sexual service, being cut off from any form of the possibility of physical reciprocation meant that it was intensely onesided and mostly underscored the sense of body-failure without offering satisfaction to me. Touch was treacherous, unsafe, with its risks of going places that ached too much to bear. Normal sexual reactions in a partner that I would ordinarily enjoy felt like being cornered, pressured, trapped; my incapacity exposed and still demanded upon. This has not been pleasant.

And, on top of it all, I'm intensely emotionally vulnerable, not in ways that promote intimacy; rather, they promote a sort of isolating self-protection. My liege is busy with a major renovation project, with being in school, and with helping take care of Little Foot; my ability to read his current emotional state is heavily dependent on a lot of factors, primary among them how well my ability to connect to people is going (not well, of late) and how relaxed he is (not very, of late). Which means I go all paranoid about questions like whether my inability to do little service things without emotional drama or the fact that Little Foot needs care or whatever else are upsetting him, and am unable to judge reactions sanely. And really, going around asking "Are you mad at me?" every time that particular anxiety demon pops up is a good way to make people mad at me ...

Okay. That's out of my head, more or less. All stuff I've said in bits, so it better not shock any relevant party. And I really should have gone to sleep when Little Foot did, alas, as I was up with her last night, but ... mrgh. Stuff in head. Gah.

Feeling a little crazy today.

The Whole Story

I have been talking, with various people, about how to deal with the subject of rape, for the last day and a half or so. (And not talking, at times, because I'm not the sort of person who's really good at untangling exactly why some arguments sound like survivor-blaming and rape apologia because I find them too upsetting to disassemble coolly.)

And one of the things that came up for me and had me wickedly shaky last night is the way that no matter how many times, how many different ways, how carefully I tell my story, I cannot tell the whole story, not in one go.

I've written about the assault here not infrequently. And each post about it has a different piece of the story - like the issues around the social construction of consent and the failures of sex education to assist in rape prevention, the effects of women's sexuality being treated socially as a form of public property, my trauma around failure at the 'gatekeeper' social role, contributions from my repressed kinkiness, normalisation of rape and lack of support, the way uncertainty and the slow erosion of boundary defenses contributed, the induced vulnerability created by the social dichotomy between attractiveness and academics, trying to come to terms with shame and internalised self-hatred around the subject, comparison of superficially similar experiences, how I had to fight for the space in which I could actually lay the responsibility for the assault at the feet of the person who did it. In other places I've laid out the facts of the events, I've written about the major kink scene my liege and I did to try to do some mental reprogramming, I've written about other things. I've probably missed a few posts about it from here, too.

None of these are the whole story. The fact that there are so many renditions, so many ways of trying to talk about the experience, so many posts, that should probably be a tip-off as to the incompleteness, the giant fucking layer cake of the experience that can only be written about one pink-icinged stripe at a time.

I can't even think about it all at once, see all the layers. At least not yet; I wonder some if that's why I keep writing about it, trying to get all the angles clear so that I can grasp it as a whole.

There are so many stories in that one event.

There are all the stories about the social, societal, familial contexts that fed into what happened, that made the space in which it could happen possible, easy. And all the stories about the social, societal, familial contexts that shaped how I responded, where the damage ran, how I scarred, where, and how deeply. A few of those, I've written.

There are the stories about the events, the way things happened, and which stories those are depend on which events one wants to include.

There are the stories about the people, too.

And there are the secondary stories. Because, for example, one of the consequences of having a version of the story about him in my head - because I, unlike everyone I've told these stories to, almost knew him - is that it feeds my self-hatred and self-blame, because I can see a little bit through his eyes. And I know this, and this is why I don't often tell any of my version of his story - because it's very easy for me to slide into victim-blaming with it if I go into any depth, even though the victim is me. And even though I don't tell the story, I refer to it, I get frustrated with people who respond to my story as if he were a monster rather than an idiot kid, I gnaw at the incompleteness of things.

Someone wrote a post, talking about how there's a vision of what a rapist looks like, and it doesn't look like anyone we know, and that this isn't true.

And, for the first time I think, I wrote about who he was in response, not a name, not a referent, not treating him as an event, but the person I maybe almost knew a little. And part of that was to make that person's point a bit, to make it clear that this was ordinary, ordinary, ordinary, that my bog-standard assault narrative has a bog-standard person as the aggressor. And it's put me more in touch, mentally, with him as a person than I have been in a while, which leaves me shaky and uncertain.



He was a perfectly ordinary geeky, arty high school kid. A little on the tall side, with what gets called an athletic build; light brown hair, long enough to ruffle without actually being long and not that I ever ruffled it (that being a contact more intimate and affectionate than I was comfortable with), jeans-and-t-shirt-wearing type, like any other ordinary high school kid. I met him through one of my classmates, and he may never have known that I was technically not old enough for high school, let alone not a junior like that friend.

He did drama club at his high school, and I went to see him perform. He listened to Peter Gabriel. He lent me the Wild Cards books one at a time. He had a computer in his room at his parents' house, an old clunky thing with a green screen, and played Ultima on it. He quoted Monty Python, at length, on a frozen day outside the Smithsonian museums on the Mall, a day when it was windy enough to make the seagulls fly backwards. ("Albatross!") I remember nothing about what we talked about on the phone, and only one movie we went to (The Cutting Edge).

He was the sort of person that people I know would know, would spend time with, would never wonder about.

He was the first attractive, potentially compatible person who had ever shown interest in me; my experience of romance was all of the junior high variety, full of blatant abusiveness and harassment, and I was an awkward, nerdy kid unfamiliar with the vagaries of proper social interaction. He said I was beautiful, not that I really believed him; he said that he loved me, after a while. I had no idea how to deal with him, because in among all of this unexpected, unfamiliar, loneliness-curing kindness was the persistent ignoring of consent, pushing at boundaries whose precise location I did not, at that point, know, up until he hit the boundaries around sex, where I at least knew that I didn't want to go there.

When he let me escape after the assault, I fled to the bathroom to try to put my mind in order. When I came back out, he was fully clothed, sitting on the couch that he had tried to pin me to, and even in my pained dissociation I thought he had realised what he had nearly done, realised and was now ashamed. Maybe even wondering how he had read me wrong, maybe - and this would be good - wondering how long he had been misreading me, whether it went back to the beginning. There was sadness and silence there, and I did not ask what it was; he had never asked me what was in my head, and asking what was in his was too intimate even if I had not been shaking and shattered inside. He walked me back to the subway so I could go home.

It was probably the next weekend or the one after that he went to the second day of a Star Trek convention with me, which I left early, claiming headache, not saying that it was terrifying to be near him and I was bleeding inside. We never spoke again after that day.

I saw him, or someone who looked like him, in a bookstore a few years later. I had a panic attack and fled to the company of my mother at a cafe, sitting by the escalator he might have come down if he were leaving that way, and I watched the stairs moved in a panic.

When my lion and I went to see the Stargate movie in the theater a few years later, I was so triggered by the looks of James Spader that I could not really bear to watch any of it. I buried myself in other-things, and we laughed about the things we had done in movie theaters in the dark, without ever shedding light into that particular bit of darkness.

Some Things They Don't Mention About Pregnancy

In honor of me now being officially past my official due date and also past my personally calculated because dammit I know when I ovulated due date, my long-pondered "Things they don't tell you about pregnancy" post.

May not apply to all pregnancies. Some assembly required. Contents may settle during shipping.

(Next time I do this, I totally want a t-shirt that says 'Contents may settle during shipping.')

* I seem to have swallowed my spare change.

First-trimester symptom: everything tastes like metal. Everything. Breathing tastes like metal. Faded out a bit after a while, but still has reappearances, like right at the moment as I'm typing this.

* Where did my seasonal allergies go?

This, this is wonderful. The horrible head cold I had during the worst of the morning sickness was the most miserably sick I've been in my life, but an entire better part of a year in which the tree sex didn't make me feel like crap is amazing.

* My joint pain went away too.

For someone who lives with chronic low-level ache and what my midwife elegantly referred to as "loose hips", the six or so months free of that was really nice. Of course my bad hip started popping again at the end of month eight, as if to make sure I didn't get my hopes up too high, but one can't have everything.

* Pregnancy update websites are probably not written with me in mind.

I first realised this when every single one of them I read one week saw fit to inform me that really, the major body change I was likely to notice around here was my breasts getting bigger, and that this was the best and most thrilling part of being pregnant.

The one that said something about my pregnancy now having lasted longer than any of my high school relationships was a nice garnish. (Gods, I hope not. Legalhusband and I have been together since I was sixteen.)

On the other hand, the Vegetable of the Week game was an excellent way to pass time. How to play Vegetable of the Week: Google "pregnancy week #" and see what article of produce the fetus is the same size as now.

* It turns out that 95% of the weird shit that happens and freaks me out is a normal pregnancy symptom.

Increased rate of heart flutters, say.

Skin tags, too.

* Your hair and nails will grow like whoa.

The nails thing is the part that throws me - as someone who had low thyroxin most of her life and is barely used to fingernails growing at a particularly noticeable rate, having to cut my nails all the time is almost upsetting in its "this is not normal" way. And it's even more fun now that I can't reach my feet.

Also, "Hair grows like whoa"? Includes pubic.

* Pregnancy is weirdly and subtly racialised.

Being someone who's in lefty-natural childrearing circumstances, I'm occasionally struck by how white things are.

By going to baby supply stores and having, on the wall, images of lots of babies and toddlers - all white, most blue-eyed.

By having people seriously suggest that the nipple-darkening during pregnancy is so babies can visually track the food source better, never mind that sight doesn't develop that clearly for a bit, mammals track by scent, and dude, where are you getting this bonus contrast concept from if you can't think of anyone other than a white person as human?

I just wow.

* Trying to get a ballpark figure for an appropriate amount of weight gain during pregnancy from the internet is not a good idea.

Take all of the crazy, interfering, I-know-better-than-you stuff that gets directed at pregnant women.

Take all of the crazy, interfering, I-know-better-than-you stuff that gets thrown around about weight and health issues.

Combine.

Or hit yourself in the head with a brick a few times. It's faster, and just as informative.

* Moods are not unstable. Moods are turned up to eleven.

Instead of "cranky" I was achieving "kill it and devour its heart that its lifeblood might sustain my offspring."

Instead of "I don't want to deal with this" I was achieving "I need to go live in a cave and contemplate the hopelessness of human interaction."

* Childbirth classes with any sort of natural bent will spend at least a quarter of the time in class talking about how to protect yourself from hospitals.

This is epically fucked up. Completely, totally, epically fucked up. Legalhusband and I would leave our childbirth class every time, exchange glances, and then he'd say, "I'm so glad we're not planning on a hospital birth. I'm so glad we don't have to go through that."

And this ranges from stuff like the friend of mine who went in for a post-term ultrasound to doublecheck that everything was okay and had the administering nurse lie to her in an attempt to panic her into admitting herself to be induced immediately to horrifying shit like a woman having her baby taken away because she refused a C-section.

They will lie. They will not talk about the risks of epidurals. They will insist on putting an IV shunt into your vein "just in case" and not mention that it's possible to refuse. They will pressure. This is why people hire doulas - when they can afford them - to help protect their families from the crushing stress and pressure. This is insane.

* Hospitals are insane. Did I mention?

If you had to go to a hospital to get a special blood test done to confirm that you were healthy enough to not have to go to a hospital for your delivery - consider the stressiness in the context of previous point please - what would you like to be hearing in the lab waiting room?

There was a television there, turned up too loud, of course, because this culture is sucktastic.

But what was playing on the television?

Medical programming, of course, it was the hospital.

What medical programming?

What would you put on?

What would you put on if you were a complete idiot?

How about a special on medical mysteries in which a family could not get treatment for their newborn's skeletal abnormality because the medical community wouldn't believe that it existed?

(Present in the waiting room: receptionist, three third-trimester women, and my liege, who had brought me there, looked at the television, and put in earplugs so he could study.)

* Heartburn can be bad enough to make you throw up.

'Nuff said.

* You will become a D&D dwarf.

The ability to detect the slightest of grades will suddenly appear. "This is an upslope." "Is it?" "Yes."

* Water is the best thing in the universe.

Go swimming. Take a bath. Get an inflatable tub that's deep enough to float the belly. It doesn't matter. Bathliness is next to godliness. I am totally composing this post in the tub.

I get in the water and all the pain and strain go away. And when I get out, I don't hurt for a while, because my muscles have had a chance to relax and unwind and rest a little, because water is totally supportive.

I am completely and totally convinced of the water ape period theory of human evolution. I found it convincing because of the whole, dude, where did our fur go thing, but experiencing pregnancy, and then experiencing pregnancy and water? Completely conclusive.

* How debilitating pregnancy is depends not merely on who you are, but random unknown factors that for all I know include the phase of the moon.

I went around and around on "Why can I climb the stairs without a problem today when I couldn't yesterday?" Damned if I know.

Pregnancy is hard physical labor, and the hard physical labor of it is completely invisible, so it's like an invisible disability only of course there's the giant belly so it's not invisible-invisible, it's just that it's implausible to people who haven't been there.

* No matter how crazy the experience makes you, everyone around you is crazier.

I've been in and out of tears. I've muttered about needing to be off my depression meds because of complications on SSRIs in the third trimester. I've wrestled with the fact that gestation takes all of my energy except enough to run the braingremlin that thinks I should be getting more done.

This is nothing compared to people around me.

In the birth class, the teacher told us that we should think about delegating someone to field all the "Is the baby there yet?" phone calls. To which one of my classmates said something to the effect of, "Who would do that?" I said, "Pregnancy makes people crazy. Not you. The people around you."

I went to a baseball game last Friday, minor league game 20 minutes from my house and probably 10 at the outside from the backup hospital. Was chatting with a woman with a toddler-in-stroller in the elevator back to the car.

"So when are you due?" she asked me.

"Monday."

My deadpan made her laugh nervously, and she said, "... cutting it a little close there, eh?"

Cutting it close? Is the baby going to erupt from me in a splash of drama during the seventh inning stretch? What?

* Relaxin feels so weird.

My pelvis is in, I think, four pieces, and every so often when I move it feels like it nearly falls apart. The muscles that are, of course, completely unused to holding my hips on are exhausted from the effort.

On the one hand, I'm glad it's all loose because it'll make it easier to expel the fishie. On the other hand, having my pubic bone pop near-audibly weirds me the fuck out.

* The belly is gyroscopic.

It does not like to change orientation. Rolling over in bed while nine months pregnant is a feat of athleticism worthy of a medal. The belly objects. If the process involves rolling over onto the back, there will be the moment of hazy, dizzy fatigue in which the vena cava is compressed which leaves one feeling like an upended box turtle. Begging for assistance at rolling over is embarassing but sometimes necessary.

* Sharp tearing pain in the foot is something that happens to a certain fraction of women in the third trimester.

It's caused by the normal pregnancy edema, and trying to talk to medical professionals about it appears to lead to flailing panic and lack of any clue of what to do. Also, it hurts like fucking hell.

* There will come a point at which the belly gets in the way of everything.

By everything, I mean everything.

I mean I can't pee without the belly getting in the way, it wants to exist in the same space as my thighs unless I take my clothes off so I can move the thighs out of the way. (Lately I've been taking my clothes off a lot.) And trying to pee on the diagnostic stick at my regular medical checkups? HAH. It took me a couple of sessions to be able to consistently find the piss.

For a while getting places by crawling worked better (especially steep staircases, like the one at my liege's house). Now ... the belly is in the way.


I'm sure I'm missing a few things, but that will do for a nice overview.

Tiller in the Seventh Month

I mentioned that I'd been affected by the Tiller assassination today to the shrink.

She said, "Yeah, I was wondering how you were reacting to that."

Just great. One of my therapist's thoughts about the news was how I was dealing with it, and on her own dime to boot.

It's obvious, of course, that it would. I'm seven months pregnant. I have anxiety issues. (Secondary effect of my depressive disorder.) My primary criterion for dealing with my pregnancy (both in terms of medical care and everything else) has been minimising stress and meddling, with a particular eye to things that I know I can degenerate into obsessive circles of increasingly frantic worry over; I know how to manage my brain when I'm off my meds, after all, I've been doing it that way for most of my life.

It is completely normal in the course of a pregnancy to have worries about the health of the baby, to have moments of 'what if', to fret about whether things are okay. The baby wants to hang out pretty much exclusively on my right side; does that mean the cord is tangled up and making my uterus into a trap? Etc. And my anxiety and I, we've got a little routine for this: I listen to the fretfulness, I acknowledge it, I point out that there's nothing we can do about it right now, I set it aside, and I go do something else.

Before Sunday.

On Sunday, as I'm sure you well know, Dr. George Tiller was gunned down in his church. A man who specialised in care and comfort for third-trimester women in tragic circumstances. Who conducted the abortions with sufficient skill and empathy to provide grieving parents with an intact body to mourn and bury. Who had followed in his father's footsteps in feeling that this care was essential for women in need (his father had had a patient die after refusing to perform an abortion, and thereafter changed his practice), who had been one of three people in the United States who did it at all. [Added:] Who was known to provide that care even to people who could not afford to pay for it.

There is often a foot wedged against my bottommost right rib, an uncomfortable pressure, sometimes accompanied by a sequence of thumps.

I think of the woman in my childbirth preparation class who has as her mantra, "If it's kicking, you know it's alive." She is pregnant after a miscarriage, after all.

After Sunday, I rock and pray that that is good enough. Kicking means alive, right?

I read, and see people talking about babies eaten up with terminal cancer, ancephaly, various other syndromes, deformities, failures to develop, and I try not to jump and startle with every kick, every vibration of the skin of my abdomen, try to stifle the exaggerated startles of my PTSD and just repeat, "If it's kicking, you know it's alive."

I have friends who have lost children to miscarriages; who learned that their desired baby was a blighted ovum and had to work through the whiplash from 'nurturing life' to 'harboring death'. One of my [legal] husband's coworkers had a baby recently, a baby who lived for two hours after birth.

I have been carrying this life for seven months. It's kicking, right?

But the fear is there, the overwhelming fear, from reading about, thinking about, the women who carried their lives for seven months, eight months, nearly nine, and then learned that no, what they had nurtured, invested in, prepared for, perhaps named, was going to die. Maybe killing them on the way too, bleeding out or rot or toxins poisoning the system or any of the other horrible malfunctions of flesh.

And people write about Tiller, write about the care he gave to these stricken families, and sometimes to do that, they have to write about why his job was necessary.

And I cradle my belly and want to howl with the terror of it.

I want to crawl into a hospital and demand tests, poking, prodding, knock me out and put a fucking closed circuit TV in my belly if you have to, let me know that it will be okay. Let me know that it's enough. Let me know that it will be all right. Even though I made all these careful, cautious, informed choices, avoiding the medicalisation of pregnancy, facing this natural process with calm and serenity and all that good stuff, I want to throw it all away and beg someone, anyone, somewhere, to give me reassurances.

Because a man who helped women face the worst when the worst had to be faced was murdered by a terrorist.

Who has certainly achieved a fine terrorist goal: one terrified woman. And with me, probably many others.

I talked about it so rationally, reasonably, with the shrink, noting in the abstract that it was setting off my anxiety, that I really ought to go to some effort to address that, remember my vitamins, all that good sane stuff.

I left her office, fractured, and my liege said that I looked completely exhausted. Yes.

And I had talked about it, which meant the walls around the roiling mass of terrified were breached, and the entire trip home I sniffled and fought back tears, trying to hold on a little longer without falling apart. Couldn't fall apart. Couldn't make a scene. Couldn't ... show ... fear.

I closed the kitchen door, a soft scrape into solitude, and when I was alone I howled like a terrified animal, howled and screamed and spat bile and let the tears roll down my cheeks. Only in solitude, because it was too much to show even my husbands.

Growing Up Vulcan

(I am endeavouring to not make this a spoilery post, but I recognise that some people are very sensitive so such things. Here's your warning. All direct references to the movie itself are from the character-background setup scenes rather than, y'know, the plot.)

I saw Star Trek: Rebooted on Wednesday.

I'm not old enough to be heavily steeped in ST:TOS, but I've been a Trekkie for all my life, so I know the gestalts. I have a handful of the novels, level of know the gestalts. Went to Trek cons in high school. That kind of thing. So I knew enough to make a reasonable judgement on how the new movie treated the characters.

What I didn't expect was the intense familiarity of Spock's childhood.

It is one thing to know that the Vulcan contemplation of logic and reason and strict emotional control is because they have a history of violence and extremes that they are attempting to avoid recapitulating, and another to see a child, keenly aware of his half-alien nature, confronted by a set of taller bullies whose sole desire is to provoke that emotional reaction, that explosion, that display of response to their taunting. The game is to break Face, to get that feeling engaged; it is a life-or-death game, and if one loses, then one is a lesser being, an alien, not really qualified to take up space among real people.

I know that path, know the cultivation of intellectualism as a form of Face, the deadly risk of emotion that comes up in shaking tunnel-vision quakes. I invented the beginnings of Surak's stoic discipline before I ever saw a Tribble, to survive at home, to survive at school, to never break Face. And I know the gnawing, undermining doubt of the half-alien, wondering if I am destined to fail because of my tainted nature, driven to succeed to prove it is no taint, proud and tenuous and fragile and able to make "Live long and prosper" come out like "Fuck you" with no more than a quirk of an eyebrow.

I know Quinto's Spock in a way I never could know Nimoy's - know the painstaking awareness of every detail, every limitation or feared limitation, every weakness, the guarded protection of every place that might possibly be vulnerable, be a place where someone could get that final snap into violence or sorrow or joy that would show too much and expose everything. Nimoy's Spock was too polished and familiar, too skilled, to ever show that he had a Face rather than was Face, and I was not old enough to empathise.

And now I can remember growing up Vulcan.

I'm Already Mourning It

I just deleted a half-written post to the newsgroup I was ranting about recently. Not because it was part of the ongoing thrash about whether "twat" is sexist or "lame" is ablist, but because in that environment ...

... one of the things that I'm working on, at least in theory, is a space opera. The current site of the action is a planet named Paradi.

Someone posted a belief that Teh Future would be that mythical postracial society in which interbreeding had eliminated all racial differences, a theory that I find ... irritating and implausible. A reply was posted pointing out that if space colonisation came before certain other things, such would clearly not happen.

Which is part of what happened with Paradi. So I half-wrote a post about Paradi's background, and then deleted it.

Because the backstory of Paradi is this:

The wealthy nations/nationgroups drove the first wave of interstellar colonisation. Partly to minimise conflicts, and partly because it was just easier to divide things up that way, each one of them went in a somewhat different direction; sometimes new coalitions between them went out on a vector partway between the two parent nations' claims and so on. In that first wave, all of the best nearby planets for colonisation were taken: in other words, the water-belt planets around yellow main sequence stars. Terraforming technology required was minimal and mostly biological, getting human-edible plants adapted to the new places and so on. (It's a space opera. I reserve the right to make it easy.)

The second wave was driven by military and industry, and started to fill in the clusters. While first-wave worlds were largely pleasant ones, these were varying degrees of marginal, collecting resources and building listening outposts and setting up shipyards and so on. Some of these drove new terraforming technologies; some drove new robotics techniques; all of them worked on consolidating the new worlds empires. Border zones got established to minimize conflicts over resources, so nobody would settle near a different power, even if there was a nice planet; whole galaxies of potential for nice planets out there, after all.

Eventually, the technology got well enough developed and old enough (thus, cheap enough) that the poorer people back on Earth could consider launching colonial missions of their own, rather than perhaps hooking up with the richer folks if they were lucky. Some nations went alone; others formed coalitions. All were stuck with a basic problem: most of the known, nearby planets that might be plausibly settled or terraformed into settleability were either claimed or in the demilitarised buffer zones of the larger powers, which, of course, had the resources of multiple worlds rather than simply dominating Earth's resources. The good nearby planets had been chosen as start vectors; new good planets tended to be discovered by expansion of the existing bubbles.

Paradi orbits a young, bright, white star. The star is hotter than Sol, and puts out a fair bit more UV; while Paradi's orbit is further out from its sun than Earth's from Sol, keeping it in the water belt, it's still not the nicest place to consider settling. Especially for the paler-skinned nations, for while science is quite advanced in this story, it has not yet cured cancer.

Paradi was settled by a coalition of Caribbean nations; it is named in Kreyol, and the name choice was somewhat propagandistic. Its population is largely black-skinned, and has likely gotten more so since it was settled. It is well away from much of the ordinary populated space, as its settlers were not confident of being able to hold a territorial claim if one of the great powers took an interest, and thus chose security through obscurity.

(How much of this is in the book? That Paradi was settled from the Caribbean, the narrator can manage on his Spanish and English in most cases, that the days get glaringly bright and there's a siesta tradition in the worst of the heat, that the planet is reasonably distant from most other settled ones, and the hospital in the main city has a large oncology department. The amount of stuff the author knows that's off the edges of the page can be immense.)

Once upon a time I could have written a post about Paradi and made it to that newsgroup, and we'd have talked about the plausibility of the sociopolitical setup, the sort of culture that winds up on a planet with that background, the nature of terraforming or interstellar travel, someone would probably have pointed out a bug with this background that was bad enough to be worth considering a revision in even for a space opera, something. Other people would have contributed their own space colony stories or commented that they had gotten an idea from mine. Someone would have written a short-short to illustrate a relevant point. Someone else would have a fine time with a pun.

Now ... I'd give odds that one or more of the racial background, the geopolitics, or the class issues thus revealed would blow up into a giant shitstorm.

So I didn't post.

I miss my sane, useful, productive writers professional chat group.

But I guess I'm accepting that today isn't five years ago.

Rolling Home to a President Like Me

Truth with all its far-out schemes....

I was raised on a diet of Pogo and Doonesbury, sixties protest rock and NPR. One of my standard jokes is that Album 1700 is my deeptape; I would sometimes listen to one side of the tape copy I had with the tape recorder under my pillow as I was going to sleep at night. (Other times it was one of the Charlie Brown musicals. Never say I'm not a bit eclectic.)

Lets time decide what it should mean....

I came to the first beginnings of real political awareness in 1986, listening to the Iran-Contra hearings and people stressing about the epic deficits of the Reagan era. I was a serious, earnest child, and I scowled while listening to the news and drew lopsided pie charts trying to figure out where the money should be going. I was sure that if I could just go through it, I could straighten it all out, and I wasn't sure why the people in the government couldn't.

It's not the time, but just the dreams that die.

The following decades kind of burned out that little spark of, "Oh, if I could only get at the stuff here I could make it all add up."

And sometimes, when the room is still...

I'm registered as unenrolled, which means that I can vote in whichever major party primary I feel more strongly about. Which means that if I hadn't been stuck in a morass of bad nerves in 2000, I would have voted in the Republican primary for John McCain.

Time, with so much truth to kill ....

I wouldn't have voted for him in the general, but I felt that his dedication to talking about issues rather than playing the mudslinging game was something worth supporting. Given the choice among a Democratic field that didn't excite me terribly, and the possibility to make a difference to the flavor of the Republican Party for the next while, I knew which way I wanted to gamble.

Of course, it turned out I was too busy being mad to vote, but that's how it would have gone if I had.

Leaves you by the windowsill so tied.

In November 2000 I was up until some ludicrous hour of the morning talking with my ex (we weren't exes at the time) and watching election results go wildly everywhere, and I commented that when I'd been walking down to the polls I'd seen a man on a unicycle bouncing a basketball as he crossed a minor highway (sometimes catching the ball in front of him, sometimes behind his head), and said, "This is gonna be a weird election."

Without a wing to take you high.

I watched the people I knew online start to slowly melt down, my newsgroups become less and less readable and more and more hostile, an atmosphere that only got worse after 9/11.

Without a clue to tell you why.

I went, a year or so later, to a local hearing on same-sex marriage access, intending to speak in favor as a heterosexual married in Massachusetts. I put my name in the hat to speak to the legislature, and I waited, and I waited, and I listened for hours, and I have stories about this, but the long and short of it is that I wound up having to go home without speaking, in part because my husband had another obligation, in part because I started gushing blood from my nose for no particular reason other than, I suppose, it being cold and dry.

Now, I just want to keep my name ....

Time crawled onwards. I watched my country slowly slide into a perdition that I felt I could do nothing about. My personal activisms started to burn out quietly, between my perceptions of the risk and my lack of hope for effectiveness. In the 2004 election, I voted in the Democratic primary, for someone unelectable whose voice I wanted at least heard a little, and I watched a lackluster Kerry campaign fail while wondering what happened to the war hero who had been elected.

Not bother anybody's game....

Time continued crawling. I grew increasingly insular, increasingly weary, increasingly disgusted, and increasingly helpless. I needed to protect my own people, a wide and varied group of various sorts, and had no energy to spare for anything outside of that. I cut what I did down to the bone, preserving sanity and energy for what slowly started to seem like the inevitable need to defend. I couldn't see the world changing to suit what I wanted it to be unless I went up and did it, and I could not afford to do it - not the mental cost, not the risks to my family, none of it. So I knew it wouldn't happen.

Without ideas of gold or fame or...

When the election season rolled around again, I could not bring myself to be terribly interested. There was nothing that would stop the slide downwards, after all; "politics as usual" would be the same established interests, the same voices, the same faces, the same donation sources, the same sorts of policies. I had reasonable confidence that whatever Democratic nominee made it through would have the ability to win, given the overall status of the Bush administration, and that was all I could bring myself to care about, all I was able to invest in.

Insane heights.

I have friends who are political junkies; I absorbed things they said quietly, without really engaging with any of it. I poked around and did "Which candidate matches your views" quizzy things occasionally, on a lark. I mostly ignored the process for a long time, finding myself unable to care terribly much which of the sets of talking heads got the nomination. I mostly watched the Republican side, because they made me anxious, and I knew whichever one of them came out on top of the slugfest would be setting a tone - and I wanted to know where my enemies were going to be coming from. I needed to defend, after all. That was all I could believe in.

I don't want a lot of money, I don't want a Playboy Bunny....

I don't remember when that started to change. But I remember listening. I remember Jon Stewart on the Daily Show saying, "... gave a speech about race that treated the American people like adults." I know that was after I started listening, started paying attention, started thinking about possibility.

Started waking up.

Just a love to call me honey late at night...

And I still didn't want to talk about politics, talk about the races, talk about the vast dramas played out on the national soap opera stage. But there was something different out there - not the same old figured with their various policies, but all basically a part of the flow of The Way Things Were. There was a possibility of something being different, and someone doing it other than me - that thing I'd had no hope of.

In my arms, by my side, in my arms, late at night.

Quietly, in my own space, I started reading party platforms. When it was down to Clinton and Obama I laid their websites out side by side and compared the issues. When McCain looked likely to take the Republican nomination I remembered 2000, and had hope for a shift back to what he had been then and there. There was ... something there, a possibility, the sort of world that I would like to see, where the people who had their differences could address them themselves.

But I don't know, I ain't been told...

There was a little spark there, that the era of hostile campaigning might come to an end, that people might have a vision and work towards it, something might change - and it wasn't policies that I wanted that change in so much as zeitgeist.

Everybody wants a hand to hold....

I thought a lot about the civil rights movements that this country has had, working for racial equality, for women, for gay rights, for so many things. It flowed in and out of my mind, the old tunes, the ways of being. I watched Across the Universe and read that speech, and I felt myself in tears.

They're so afraid of being old....

I was quiet, and focused, and almost reluctant to make comments supporting one candidate over another, because of the weariness of those years. But there were the songs in my heart again, and I remembered them, and hummed them quietly to myself.

So scared of dying so unknown, and all alone....

Something in me started to live again.

Rolling home.

I watched the hardening of the discourse, the negativity, and folded in on myself. The insulting terms that were thrown every which way about the candidates and their supporters depressed me almost catastrophically.

But at the same time, I saw people inspired. Creative. I saw LOLcats. I saw an entire blog of photos of Obama with kids, his own and others, and just this sense of comfort and ease with small people. I saw occasional images of his relationships with his family, laughing with his daughters, heard about the puppy so that when he spoke about it in his acceptance speech I said, "A puppy!" before he mentioned it and drew funny looks from my men. I saw pumpkins. I saw all these different upswellings of feeling, and creation, and, yes, being talked to like an adult.

And there was new music, too. New music, my gods, new music.

There was a story, sometime in there, where a bunch of reporters found Obama in a diner and wanted to get his opinion on the Crisis Of The Moment, and he looked at them, and was reported to say, "Why can't I just eat my waffle?"

Why can't I just eat my waffle?

That was a clinching moment for me, oddly enough; this eminently human reponse, this realness, this sense that here was someone who wasn't going to just spew talking points or declaim on positions at the drop of a hat, but who was a real human being who occasionally has breakfast.

A friend made me a livejournal icon of it.

And I watched the first campaign that actually started to speak my language. Not just in terms of what I called the first political campaign of the 21st century in terms of its grassroots and internet work. But in the sense that somehow, somewhere, someone knew about that little girl who drew little pie charts about the budget, putting huge slices of it towards education, because damnit, if we only had the numbers we could do something to put it right. Someone wasn't ashamed of having been the little kid who said, "Hey, I'm smart enough to figure this out, just let me at the problem," in a country where politics has had a strong anti-intellectual current for my entire lifetime.

And I saw, just before Halloween, a photo of Obama on some tarmac somewhere, talking with an aide, with a pumpkin tucked under one arm, as if that were a perfectly normal thing to do.

I had never seen a politician preparing to carve pumpkins before.

You want the real America? Goddamn, a politician with a fucking pumpkin.

A friend posted this image today and I laughed at the sticker on the computer, but, again, this is a real human thing, something familiar and real and I laugh not just because it's silly but because it's human and known and damnit I wish I'd thought of that, you know?

And it's a trivial thing, a silly thing, not enough to put a vote on ...


... but it's enough to make the vote I cast mean so much more.


Because I voted for a President who's actually like me, and I never thought that would happen.

I never thought it would be okay to be the little girl who hoped her government could be fixed again.

Election Special

In honor of tomorrow's US elections, I give you:

Ten political positions that some people probably want to throw things at me for.

1) A foreign policy that does not acknowledge that people around the world have genuine grievances with the colonizing West in general and the United States in particular is doomed to horrible failure. Acknowledging that other people might possibly be pissed about American exceptionalism, imperialism, and meddling in their internal affairs is not unpatriotic, it's not being a damned fool.

2) Corporations are not people. As they cannot fulfil the obligations of citizenship or face the consequences that actual people do for their actions, due to not being people and all, they do not merit the same access to choice that people get. In other words: I'll start to care about corporate "free speech" when a corporation can do time for negligent homicide.

3) Neo-Prohibition does not work; those who do not learn from history, doomed to repeat, etc. It funds organised crime and terrorism; it ruins lives; it is fundamentally racist. And if that wasn't bad enough, the "War on Drugs" is fucking expensive, and even if we really want to waste our money on increasing crime, destroying families, locking up nonviolent drug users, and other idiocies, we can't afford to be that stupid right now.

4) Prevention is cheaper than crisis response. Harm reduction works better than wishing problems just wouldn't happen. Education and opening access to options improve things in the long run. This applies to health care access, sex work, sex education, drug use, juvenile delinquency, same-sex marriage rights, and approximately everything else in the political universe.

5) The question of "when does life begin" is totally irrelevant to the political discussions it appears in. The answer is "probably somewhere around four billion years ago", give or take half a billion, and if you think otherwise you need to be locked in a small room with a biology textbook that includes a section on the refutation of spontaneous generation and the development of omne vivum ex ovo. When it matters that there's life there may be an interesting question, but that's a completely different field.

6) Anyone who says "get the government out of the business of marriage" needs to be slapped, and then have explained to them in very small words about the whole fact that we have an entire branch of government there to sort out people's legal contracts, and what makes marriage such a sooper-speshul legal contract that it should get excepted from that? (Oh, you think marriage is religious? Enshrining that in the law's a violation of the Establishment Clause.)

7) While I'm on the subject, marriage should be gotten the hell out of the tax business. The sensible filing for taxation purposes is at the household level, and marriage is simply one way of establishing a household relationship -- one that is both the only one effectively recognised and woefully inadequate for addressing the variety of households extant. Households are not now, and never have been, all single people and marrieds-and-their-offspring. Some people have extended families, unrelated dependents, or other broader setups. Some people have untraditional family structures. Make it as annoying to establish and dissolve a household unit as it is to establish and dissolve a marriage if you have to, but fucking sheesh.

8) The US economy is structured in a manner that is fundamentally anti-family. The evidence is overwhelming: hours in our work week, vacation time typically available, health care costs, access to parental leave time for births/adoptions, and that's just stuff I can think of official statistics for off the top of my head. Not things for which there are statistics that I can't think of off top of head, or the pervasiveness of culture of overwork to replace self-value, or the tendency to work people double-time rather than hire more workers, or the fact that large numbers of people have to work two or three part-time jobs to bring in enough to care for their families and still don't have any goddamn health care.

9) Political name-calling makes people look like they're stuck in a rather petulant childhood. I don't care if it's Nobama or McSame, Democraps or Rethuglicans, or any of the other oh-so-grade-school variations. "Libtard" is one that's been going around my sports group a lot, and I'm sure there's an equivalent conservative one but I've probably killfiled whoever uses it. All the cries of "commie" are like the schoolyard braying of "gay"; if they are, who fucking cares? Liberal, conservative, progressive, socialist, and so on are not Bad Words to throw at the other children after pulling their hair and then run away tittering in the corner with your little clique of puerile delinquents. (Neither is "Muslim".) It doesn't reveal you as clever, it reveals you as an uncreative brat who needs a time-out and possibly a nap. Stomp your little velcro-sneakered feet all you like, but as long as you continue with that tantrum you're going to have to sit in the corner.

10) Formulating things in terms of "rights" is a defective way of arranging policy. Speaking of petulance, how often does one hear a sullen, "Well, I gotta right," in response to some critique? Operating in a rights-based framework feeds an attitude of entitlement that, frankly, the US doesn't really need. Too many absolutes in the picture, and too many mistaking a right to one thing for a right to something only peripherally related -- how many times have you wanted to say, "Your right to free speech does not obligate me to listen to your idiocy"? Frame things in terms of what people can do, not what they have a right to do, and you start to actually have some nuance.

The Marrying Kind

I went on one of my "Well, I'm behind again" runs through the blogs and livejournal and came across a couple of posts about relationships and marriage, which of course is one of the umpty things on my mind at the moment. (I'm more preoccupied with depression, celiac diet, and wrestling with work, but marriage is at least mostly more cheerful.)

One of the things that I've been chewing on is the space between the private and the community; marriage is a liminal thing, really. And where the boundaries on community are.

And it's hard to write about the stuff in my head. It's odd, the way marriage is much more a publically stated thing than, say, my d/s, but the d/s is mostly easier to write about. But there's the thing where a marriage -- at least an unmarked case thereof -- doesn't require much in the way of explanation. I can say "my husband" and it just floats off on discourse, and maybe something gets misapprehended because some people have dippy notions about what that means, but for the most part that doesn't even hit undertow.

A bit of my brain wants to make wedding plans right now. Work out the format, the structure of asking people to witness, the contract. It's been kicked into my mind because of poking at the question of rings and their design, and it's not shaking loose easily. And it's maybe early (though some people do much more long-term planning on such things), and it's certainly busy, and yet ...

... I fret about things. Like trying to navigate the nightmare of parents, who might well have been happy about our respective first marriages, but have varying opinions on the validity of the second. I want to talk to my brother about the nightmare of trying to figure out the lowest-drama solution for dealing with my mother. (My brother, dear sane fellow that he is, took my announcement of my engagement with a, "Congratulations. I guess I should meet this person sometime, huh?")

And maybe it'd be easier to do the private little oathgiving and ring exchange with a few loving hecklers as witnesses, but I'm too much of a liturgist and ritualist to have that feel like it works for me. Easier to just skip the whole question of what to tell the parents, if anything, and have it come up when it comes up, if ever, easier for someone whose mind doesn't have the same shape as mine.

And an acquaintance just came out poly to his parents, someone who's been poly for long enough that his children, half a generation or so younger than me, were raised in a household in which that was normal. He'd gotten worn down by it all, I gather from his writing about it. And there's meaning there, and recognition, though I don't know what sorts of relationships he has.

What does a marriage mean? This shape of placing that relationship in a context that I cannot right now articulate. And my context is complicated and full of family and friends and the eloquent tangles of the past, and for all that I've had this ring half a year it's only started to feel real in the last half-month, the thing that I never thought would work out for me, the thing that leads me to snuggling up in a discussion about plans and parents and marriage and saying, wonderingly, "How did we get here?" to get the answer, "We really failed at casual sex."

What does it mean to do this, to stand up and say it, even though the society as defined by that which holds the laws cannot and will not hear it said? What does it mean, to do it damn well anyway, without religious imperative, just because it matters?

I think that's what I'm wrestling with, under all the flailing at other things, that deeper grappling with why. Superficially, the ability to answer the drama if drama comes with an understanding of why is provoking it.

But the thing about doing it is knowing what I'm doing.