Just a Quickie

I’ve been stuck in a bit of a depressed rut for the last couple of days. I woke up one morning, just hating the whole entire universe and all of existence, and it took me a few days to shake it. If I’m being completely honest, who knows if I really have.

I tend to get to this point now where I just hate the depressed feeling. I hate the fatigue, I hate the body pain, I hate the constant edge of tears, I hate how defining what your feeling seems like the most pressing issue you’ve ever faced. I hate it and I get incredibly bored of it. So, I just walk away from it.

I know I’m making it sound really easy, but you have to remember that I’ve been suffering with depression for a good number of years, so it’s a little different when you teach yourself to live with it.

The kids have all been a little out of control this past week and that just adds to every bit of inadequacy that I may feel. They get out of school and are all grumpy and pestering each other. We get home and it’s immediate mess-making time. And they seem to have everlasting energy that absolutely drains the parents. Add to that the fact that they are all refusing to listen and it’s just a big headache.

I’ve been slacking in just about every area. From letting a lot of my cleaning slide and basically ignoring my computer, I just have felt very much like curling up into a ball and sleeping. How The Boyfriend deals with it and doesn’t get frustrated and fed up is beyond me, because I find it to be an impossible time – even if it only lasts a few days.

I ended up supporting FetLife on a whim this week, so now I can go further back in my feeds and watch videos and stuff. That’s been quite a fun experience and I was delighted to get to see a few videos that you can’t find on the average porn site (although I make the strong argument that when there is no sex, it’s not porn). I also finally updated some more of my profile, which I’ve been working on doing for months now.

Then, again on a whim, after deciding that I wasn’t going to, I bought The Sims 4. I had said I wasn’t going to because the specifications all said that it wouldn’t run on my laptop. But then The Boyfriend kept telling me, “Everyone said that Warcraft wouldn’t run on my computer and yet it did” and my sister had bought it on her less awesome computer than mine, so I figured I’d give it a shot. Imagine my excitement when it totally worked! Although surprisingly, I haven’t played it nearly as much as I was expecting I would.

This week, I’ve gotta try to get some stuff done. I’ve gotta force myself to get up off my butt and do something. Getting all the cleaning that I keep putting off done would be a start. I also really want to do some reading and writing – now that I’m finished Brave New World, I’m right into The Bell Jar and got about 4 chapters through it during my last bath.

Well that’s basically all I have to say, just wanted to do a quick update 😉

#WhyWeNeedFeminism – Rants A-Brewing!

Remember when I was talking about that hashtag… Well, it’s rearing it’s ugly head in my life profoundly and I feel like I’m embarking on this very sudden abrupt journey.

When I first ran across the #WhyWeNeedFeminism hashtag, it was really difficult for me to debate anything with anyone about it, because I just didn’t feel very connected to it. For me, in my life, I’ve never really seen that we need feminism, because everything I needed as a woman was already fought for. Or at least it seemed that way because I was raised by a strong, independent, no-man-needing woman who raised us to believe that I was just as good as all the boys, even my brother. So, I couldn’t relate.

However, in the past few days and an instance a few months back, have completely changed my thinking. The instance a few months back didn’t really click it in for me, it was just kind of floating in my brain waiting for this exact moment to resurface.

Kaeidyn, my 9-year-old, is quite the little diva. She’s always been that way. And I hate to say it, but she is quite vain. She’s always asking for compliments, she’ll walk up to total strangers and say “Don’t I look cute in this outfit?”, and the clothes she wears… First, she has a lot of family members who don’t know how to say no to her. Hell, I’m not even that good at it. So she’s been able to figure out ways to get very short skirts and very short shorts.

This one day, she comes down from her room wearing the shortest skirt ever. Now another thing about Kaeidyn, is that she is incredibly gorgeous. And I’m not just saying this as her Mom. Somehow, she has got a really great body – legs that go on for miles, a butt that looks like it belongs to a much older girl and her skin carries an amazing tone to it that just makes her glow. She knows this entirely. So, she comes down in this short skirt and I immediately tell her she cannot wear it out of the house.

I’m a pretty nice Mom that way, much the same way my Mom was. If it’s too short to wear out of the house, I’m not saying you have to get rid of it, but you have to stay inside when you wear it.

Of course, as usual, we get into a huge arguement about why I’m so mean to her, blah blah blah. At some point, The Boyfriend joins in, as he usually does and he says to her, “You don’t want some boy to rape you because you wore that out”. Worst parenting moment ever on my part, because right in front of her, I was like, “Eh, eh, eh, eh. Now now! We don’t say things like that” and launch into a mini-lecture about victim blaming.

This was just the first hint.

Then, we go down to my Mom’s and that day, Kaeidyn got to walk with Kenzie to the store by herself for the first time. She was very excited and couldn’t wait to tell. As a 9 almost 10-year-old, and the fact that she’s been working hard to gain some trust so that she can go further away from the house, I decided in a rushed moment that it was okay by me. And she did great, they both did.

My Mom has a tendency to forget what it was like when we were kids and the stuff that we got away with when we did. I was in Grade 2 when I was walking to the store by myself and by the time I was Kaeidyn’s age, I would walk to go get her smokes from the local convenience store. She was quick to point out that I was always with my sister, who is 17 months older than me. Kaeidyn went with her brother, so in my books, a-okay!

Almost immediately, my Mom starts going off about how “she’s a girl” and that “it’s much more dangerous for girls” and that she hopes I’ll wait until Kaeidyn is in her teens before I start letting her go anywhere without her brothers… And then begins in on the rape that is just out there around every corner waiting for every single girl that’s ever going to walk out the front door!

Is anyone else feeling queasy yet, or is just me?…

I’m not saying that girls shouldn’t be, to some degree, concerned about getting raped and that it should kind of be a guiding voice in our heads. Don’t go walk through that forest in the middle of the night, don’t go out drinking without a buddy, don’t go jogging down your favorite trail on a Friday night when all the lamps just happen to blow out. You know, make some smart choices and such…

However, I do not want a single day of my daughter’s life to somehow be less-than because she was afraid of getting raped. I don’t want her to not be able to accomplish her dreams because there was an iota of a chance that she could get raped. I don’t want to spend my own life, as a girl, in fear of every man that walks by me, because he might rape me…

Rape, and the possibility of it happening in my life, should not change how I live my life. And it should not change the way I raise my daughter as opposed to my sons, it should not change the way we, as girls are treated. It should not change the lessons we are all taught about life. We raise little boys to be brave, because no one is going to rape them. We raise little girls to be weak, because everyone is going to rape them.

And I am here, as a concerned mother, to say I HAVE HAD ENOUGH!!

Then, the absolute kicker in the whole pants of the #WhyWeNeedFeminism debate. If you’ve read the entries from the last two days, you probably know exactly where I’m going.

For me to be considered sexually attractive by my partner of six years, I have to dress up as something that I am simply not, I have to “be more sexual” when I’m already more sexual than any other person I know who doesn’t only live on the internet, I have a huge laundry list of ways that I have to be, endlessly, to be sexually attractive. Then, that becomes repititous and whose fault is that? You guessed it, mine!

For him to be considered sexually attractive, he has to wear whatever the hell he found on the floor, shower once a week, shave once a month and never even have to worry about how he looks or acts or thinks…

He can walk around with his shirt off and no one says a thing. I can’t even breastfeed in public without dirty looks and people telling me I should go to the bathroom to do that. Do you eat where you shit?!? Then, why should my baby! He can walk through the mall with his hands down his pants, scratching his balls for the whole world to see, and I can’t even pick a wedgie.

Like seriously, what are we teaching our kids? What are we letting ourselves get away with? How blind can we be…?

Don’t even get me started on how I’m viewing things now that I’ve been slapped in the face in terms of society and it’s relation to my womanhood – because that’s a whole can of worms that I’m not even prepared to open. But in just my world, my little miniscule world of about 10 people, this is #WhyWeNeedFeminism and why we will always need it…

Awkward Conversations

Yesterday was just plain awkward…

After he called yesterday, and I sounded more pissy than ever, he came home as if he was walking on the thinnest of ice. I swear to you that he literally tip-toed into the house, set down my coffee without so much as a word and then went and sat as far away from he as he could.

I ignored him for a good long while. Then, I had casual friendly conversation with him about my day and the cute things the kids had done. I joked and laughed and he awkwardly sat in silence, obviously unsure of what he was supposed to do.

Then, sometime after dinner, I went upstairs to my room. I never do this. Never. The kids of course flocked upstairs, and I ended up dozing off with one of the kids sleeping next to me. A few hours pass and I wake up from a pain in my knee and go downstairs. He’s fallen asleep on the couch. He never does this. Never.

I go back to bed, deciding that we’ll just spend another day in awkward hell, who cares. About an hour passes and he comes upstairs to grab his cellphone charger – good thing too, otherwise who knows how he would’ve gotten up this morning. Even though he knows I’m awake, he pretends like I’m sleeping, still on the tips of toes.

I awkwardly blurt out, “So, is this how it’s going to be then?”, and he stops dead in his tracks. He stops and stares like a deer caught in the headlights and I say that I can’t stand this silence for one second longer. I should not be feeling like I’m being punished simply for expressing myself.

I know he’s feeling terrible and guilty and just as awkward, if not more, than I am. I’m trying my best to be sensitive to that, while also fuming because this should not be a hard conversation for us to have. We’ve had it so many times before. It’s what happens when one person is kinky and the other isn’t.

We end up coming back downstairs and the conversation really gets going. First, I bring up the fact that I know he’s been sneaking around to watch porn. At first, he lies and says that he hasn’t watched porn since the last time we watched it together. This raises my anger level to an uncontrollable level and I shout at him, sarcasm seeping through every syllable, “Are you kidding me? No, someone just happened to use the internet browser on your cellphone two days ago to watch YOUR porn!”. Every inch of my body was shaking. I yelled more about how I knew absolutely that he was without a doubt lying to me.

He eventually confessed. Then he lied again about where he was watching it and how, but I decided to let that go to talk about the heart of the issue. I began, “I just don’t understand how here you have the most sexually open girlfriend in the entire world, and all I’m asking is for a little bit of honesty about your porn habits, and you can’t even try. I tell you about every single time I watch porn, every time I masturbate, every fantasy I have. You shut me out of that stuff. And it makes it feel like we’re disconnected on the deepest level.”

He defensively responded with two points, not related to the porn but related to my sexual frustration, and I sat quietly and let him have his moment, even though I was raging. I listened to him tell me, “I just haven’t been interested”, more than once last night. And I was delighted when my silence didn’t deter him from continuing to open up.

We talked about so many things in that three hour awkward conversation on the couch. How I find the type of porn that he likes appauling, how he’s just so exhausted sometimes that sex does just seem like another job he has to get through, how I look at sex as something so much more than sex and that’s why I get so upset about it, how he doesn’t feel what I’m feeling.

I held back tears, so many times, as I tried to explain to him how he can make me feel so insecure. How one night of a lack of sexual desire on his part can make me feel undesirable in every aspect of our life together. And I turned my face away and held my hand over my quivering lips, as he praddled off his ideas of how we could fix this problem – including me buying lingerie, me being more forceful, me kicking him off of games earlier, me wearing a bra (so he has something to take off, not that he takes off any of the clothes I currently wear…), me doing this and me doing that and me working my ass off to make him attracted to me.

He might as well have said, “Lose about 30 pounds, get some bigger breasts and a tighter ass, and be as overtly sexual as you can – and then maybe you’ll turn me on.”

“I just haven’t been able to get interested”, he said and I nodded in understanding, “That’s why I’ve been watching the porn…” and he said, “I mean, it’s probably going to sound mean…” and I stopped him. I said, “I don’t want to hear this next thing. I’m almost 100% sure that I know what you’re going to say, and I don’t want to hear it. Once I hear it, it becomes real and that is not a reality I can face right now.”. I knew he was going to suddenly confess that the lie he had told earlier about where he was consuming his porn was exactly that and instead that he watches it right before we have sex, to get himself going. That is not a truth I can face.

Because what do I do with that information?!? I mean, even now, it’s the one part of the conversation – next to all the work he thinks I should do to even just attempt to get a chubbie out of him – that just keeps playing over and over again in my mind. He watches porn immediately before having sex, sneaking around to do it because I cannot like teen porn, and then comes to me with that. All I keep thinking is “How dare he!”.

He had gotten himself quite worked up talking about teenage breasts and the idea of me shoving him up against the wall and just having my way with him. He asked if we could carry on the conversation up in bed and I agreed, my mind just spinning. We laid down and I said quietly, “I just don’t think it’s fair that you walk into the room, and without even doing anything or saying anything, I feel immediately turned on by you. And I have to remind myself that right now I’m mad at you. But I have to go buy lingerie and bras and basically rape you for you to feel at all turned on by me.”

His body slumped and I could feel him fighting the urge to roll over, guilt consuming him. If he could’ve, he probably would’ve crawled into a dark hole. I rolled to face him and said, “Since you’re the one that gets out of the house every once and awhile and has all the money, why don’t you buy me lingerie or bring me home sex toys? If you want those things, you should get them, because I don’t need them and they’re not for me…”.

Who knows what is going to come out of all of this. Today, I’m going to bet that he’s going to act like we didn’t just spend the last day in hell. He’ll come home today and all will go back to normal for him until the next time this flares up again on my end. He’ll walk in and sit next to me, he’ll figure we sorted it all out and all of it is over now. And I’m not ready for it to be over…

If anything, last nights conversation has added more fuel to the fire and I have even more grievances to air, because what I thought was the problem was only a small fraction of the problem. So now it’s all about figuring out what I’m going to do with all this new information and how I’m going to handle the coming days… I still just keep thinking that I am just so done…

I’m… just… done…

Yesterday was mostly not a good day and I am just still absolutely reeling from it. I tried to sleep most of the day away today so that I wouldn’t have to think about it all, though only made it to noon and very restlessly at that.

It started with all the walking. For some reason, the knee pain that hasn’t been bothering me in almost four years, is back with a vegenance. Walking from our house to my Mom’s, to Wal-Mart, back down to Mom’s and back home was just too much for it. I spent most of the night complaining.

Then, I chose last night to finally be beyond frustrated at my sexual situation. He stayed up late playing games, I stayed up late working on computer stuff. Then, I asked if he wanted to take a shower with me and he was game, but kept procrastinating. Generally shower together = sex. I had hinted at him, both subtely and overtly, many times during the day that I had every intention of getting laid last night.

I decide I’m ready to get my loving on, and head upstairs and say forget the shower. He’s barely awake enough for sex, let alone shower and sex. So I crawl into bed and stick out my ass as far as I can, hoping he’ll snuggle up against it like he normally does and we’ll both turn each other with the grinding and warmth and skin-to-skin contact. Except, he puts his hand on my leg and immediately, I can tell he’s going to fall asleep. No movement in the hands, no trying to reach up to touch my boobs, just flat flaccid fingers.

So I kick my feet, “Baaabbbee!!” and he knows exactly what I’m going to say and immediately you can feel his whole body sink. He hates when I complain about our sex life. And the venting began. I don’t even remember all of what I said, the contained words and emotions just bursted forth. I remember yelling out, “I know you don’t care about sex, but I DO!” and with clenched jaw calmly, “It may be enough for you to have sex every 4th or 5th night, but in my world there is no reason why we can’t be having it every single day – hell, multiple times a day!”. I was absolutely in no control of what was coming out of my mouth, it just continued to spew. I’d stop myself and try to silence that voice in my head, and then without even being aware, words would just start jumping. That’s what happens when I let it fester too long.

I finally finish, all the words now escaped, and my heart is pounding heavy in my ears, my palms are sweating profusely and all I keep thinking is “Say something, say something, say something!” – not even to the tune of the catchy song, just an unending repeating line. In the silence, insecurity grows. In what felt like hours, but really only amounted to minutes, my thoughts became so distorted. I couldn’t even remember what I was attempting to do when I started it all, and I felt like we were worlds away from each other, even though he was mere inches away in bed! “Say something, say something, say something!”.

The issue was no longer his sex drive, the issue was now mine. The frustration was no longer about wanting to have sex, it was now about how much of a freak I was for wanting so much sex. The problem wasn’t sex drives at all, the problem was my appearance. And once I get to that one, it is officially a point of no return. A point where I can’t hear what he has to say, because it’s all lies (even if it’s not, my brain will not believe it). I can’t see anything and every thought immediately goes to “You’re fat”, “You’re ugly”, “You’re undesirable”, “You’re unwanted” and it just spirals and spirals and spirals.

I’m not typically a girl who cares much about what other people think about my appearance. Yeah, when you call me names or whatever, I’m likely to cry, but be truly and profoundly upset by it – to the point where it screws with my psyche – it’s pretty rare. I’m very accepting of my weight, I don’t hate my curves or the extra padding around my hips. Yes, I have acne and frizzy straight hair and I’m well aware that I’m nowhere close to a supermodel. But do I really care all that much? Do I spend a lot of my day considering those things? Not really.

However, silence… His silence… During a point where I’m sexually frustrated… Insecurity grows and grows and grows until eventually it’s so loud and so big that you can’t ignore it no matter how hard you try. Every little flaw that ever even flickered through your mind, wasn’t even a lasting insecurity, just flickered there, every single one comes rushing out of the recesses of your memory and suddenly, you are the ugliest, fattest, most undesirable, disgusting, low-life, worth nothing piece of crap.

And I know that this is not realistic. I know that this is the abuse cycle coursing through my veins. I know that he thinks none of those things at all, because he IS NOT Alfie. I know that his silence doesn’t mean anything more than him processing. I try everything to control this irrational insecurity.

I turn playful, because apparently this is my new defense mechanism. If I’m smiling or joking or laughing, or poking or prodding or tickling, then all is good. I feel protected and I feel like I am protecting them from the craziness that is me…

I grab at his arms and wrap my arms about him, my heart still pounding, and nuzzle into him playfully shaking him, “Say something, anything. What are you thinking?!?”, my voice trying to sound encouraging, supportive, communicative – even though I can feel myself crumbling to pieces the longer he doesn’t repond. And it took forever before he finally made any movements like he was going to do or say anything.

He said exactly one sentence. He says it everytime I try to have a serious discussion about my mounting sexual desires and his declining sex drive. “I just know everything i say is going to get turned back around on me”.

Now, I’d like to take a second to point out that (1) This is not something that I used to do. He said this the first time we ever had a serious discussion about anything, before anything had ever gotten “turned back around” on him. (2) That what he means by this exactly has never really been defined. Apparently, from what I can gather at this point, it is any response you may have to what he says. You can tell him he’s right, you can tell him he’s wrong, you can change the subject, it does not matter. Whenever you respond with anything but silence, this is considered as you turning something back around on him.

I am not saying anything negative about the way that he is expressing himself. I’ve been with him long enough to be able to read through the figurative lines here. I know that he feels beyond emmasculated when I pick apart our relatively great sex life and I know that he has no words to express that feeling. I know that he’s feeling vulnerable and needs support even when I’m criticising him. I know that his communication methods are deeply flawed and so does he. So I assure him that I won’t turn it “back around” on him, that I will do my best to just keep my mouth shut.

Often, I’ve discovered, after three days that mounting sexual frustration gets to be too much for me. And my way of dealing with it is to playfully whine to The Boyfriend, “You suck” or “You’re a dink!” and when it’s real bad, a very much joking and I would even argue, flirtatious “I hate you!”. Again, it’s that protection and self-preservation. I don’t want to say what I’m really feeling, like “I feel undesirable”, so I say, most commonly, “You suck!”.

So he blurts out, “It’s because you beat me down, like with ‘You suck’ and stuff like that.”. Again, this is a common phrase that he throws out. He is a master deflector. My jaw always drops, no matter how many times we have this discussion. It immediately puts me on the defensive, because I’ve explained numerous times to him the reason I say “You suck”, as opposed to pouring my broken insecure heart out to him… I begin to explain that to him again and in the process, turn the whole thing “back around” on him.

Silence falls between the two of us. My heart is pounded the loudest and fastest rhythm I’ve ever heard, and his breathing quiets until he is officially asleep. I’m left wide awake, fuming, reeling, on the verge of puking from the mini panic attack I’m having at the deep and awkward, uncomfortable silence that lingers in the air.

I went to bed, the only thought in my head, re-playing itself over and over again, lulling me to sleep, “I’m done!, I’m done!, I’m done!”, over and over and over.

When his alarm went off for work this morning, I threw it at him harder than I had meant to. When I woke up next, he was gone to work and “I’m done” was still streaming through my head. When I got out of bed, he called minutes later and I… am… just… done!

What that means… I couldn’t even begin to tell you. My brain cannot even get anywhere past the word done. I have no idea what it means, or how I’m going to figure out what it means or anything. I have no idea… I’m just done…

Sick and Trying to Write

First week of school done, first snowfall of the year and everyone is getting sick! Carter started two days ago with a runny nose that has now turned into a full-out cold. Kenzie started last night and I woke up this morning with a very prominent tickle in my throat. Which means that by tomorrow, I will be incapacitated to my chair under a big fluffy blanket and the most you’ll get out of me is a cough here or there.

I hate getting sick. It’s just about the worst thing. They’re always worse than you think they’re going to be, they always make you feel gross for days and just when you get over one, another one is just around the corner. It’s very depressing.

And that’s right, I said above snowfall. That dreadful white stuff, which we weren’t supposed to get, started falling and ever since the weather has been some slushy rain coldness. Needless to say, it’s been freezing cold and none of us were prepared for it. Stupid Alberta…

Not too much else has been going on. I got through another bunch of chapters of Brave New World and am enjoying the story immensely so far (also started a story inspired by it…). The Boyfriend and I worked our butts off the other day to get the kitchen clean, even pulling out the fridge – which was definitely needed! Other than that, it’s mostly be computer time for me.

Lots of The Sims 3 being played, tons getting done for The Erotic Writers Group and have spent the last couple of days testing out Scrivener. It was suggested by the group and so far, I’m liking it for organizing story pieces. I’m still setting up all my folders and backend stuff, so that I get into the crunch of writing some of The Brighton Tales, because seriously, I am so ready for this story to be out of my head, on paper, for consumption.

I’m having a really difficult time on choosing a name for the female slave in this story, which is making the writing much more difficult. Up until now, I’ve mostly just referred to her by pronouns and when I’ve written something that requires a name, I’ll just little brackets, because I’m not exactly sure what I want to call her. I know that I want her to have a normal “Brighton” name (although, what is that even?!?) and then she gets called the same thing as all the other slaves once she’s ritually taken by Atticus. What to call her, hell, even what to call the slaves – haven’t quite figured that out yet…

Slaves are even the wrong word to use for those in service to the Kingdom of Brighton. I hate when the words trip you up on the writing!

Successful at Sleep Lacking

Well, we made it through the all-nighter and busy day off and somehow survived it all. It was exhausting to say the least but we accomplished just about everything we set out to do.

The night went by with relative ease and before we knew it, it was 5 AM and the kids were started to stir. By 7:45 we were beginning the 40 minute walk to Wal-Mart. The school shopping ended up being quite a bit easier than we expected thanks to a less busy store. Kids all got one new outfit and new school shoes too and we only missed one thing on the list, because they didn’t have it!

We were hoping to come home at this point and The Boyfriend and I had planned to power nap until we had to leave again, but by the time we were done shopping it was already time to head to my Mom’s. So, off we went. The walk down there was absolutely brutal on our now wiped out bodies and we both had problems keeping our eyes open in the hot sun.

Dinner was amazing! As it normally is. However, by the time that we were done, we were so ready to go home. Not to my surprise, once we got home, it wasn’t immediate sleep or even a few hours until sleep. We ended up staying up only a few hours short of what we normally stay up. But the second my head hit the pillow, I was fast asleep and slept soundly, then woke up with ease this morning!

I’ve spent most of my day trying to fix The Sims 3 and I seem to be getting nowhere at the moment. Thinking I might just end up leaving the expansion packs off and playing without them – call it $20 lost. Then again, I’m thinking I might just leave it and play The Sims 4 when it comes out tomorrow. I’m so excited!!

It’s also first day back at school tomorrow. Not so much looking forward to that, even though I should be being that we are probably more prepared than we ever have been before. Carter goes the next day for his first day, which I just think is absolutely stupid, but I’m getting over it.

Then, it’s time to start planning for the three of the kids birthday parties. We figure we’re just going to throw one big one for all of them, otherwise we’d have 3 parties – 2 over the next 2 weeks and 1 a few weeks later. We haven’t quite figured out what we’re going to do but I’m betting that it will most likely be swimming.