31 Days to 'Change Your Life' - 1 - "Me and myself in a nutshell." in Dancing on a Blade (September 2019)

Yeah, I think it’s gonna take more than 31 days, babe, but whatever.

Where do you start on yourself? Description?

Fine, I’m female (cisgender) and I’m five foot six and a half. I weigh too much and it’s not okay, I’m pretty unhealthy. I am freshly forty years old. I have terrible teeth. Spawn kicked me in the mouth over a despised pork chop when she was three, but to be fair, they were bad before that. She just broke a lot of them at one go.

I don’t have a job. Yet. However, since my husband basically abandoned us to go and live the Disability of His Dreams, I have to get one. When we got married, he was pretty adamant that I should stay home and raise the kids. Dummy me, I forgot to see if I was okay with that. Anyway, I’ve done most of that now - the kids are 13, 13 and 16 - and now he wants me to support him in his “retirement.” I kind of object. I don’t mind working, I’m looking forward to it, I’ve liked all my jobs (if not all my managers). I resent the speed and the enormity of the task he left me. I’m not at all prepared to make what it would take to support us a year - 60k plus.

Jobs I have held: babysitting, babysitting, babysitting, maternity store clerk, Oregon Dept. of Revenue scanner (you read tax returns for user inaccuracies, like counting dependents twice (there used to be a line for “blind or disabled” that people used to use even when they shouldn’t have.) I’ve worked at a fabric store, and a Burger King, and for like three nights, as a telemarketer. Ah, I read tarot cards one summer for a psychic hotline. I never got paid, though.

Do we define ourselves in the terms used by others?

Then I’m the daughter of a stay at home mom and an over the road trucker. He had birth defects. She’s kind of insane. I have two brothers, both younger. One is clearly our parents’ favorite (well just Mom’s now) and the other one is Mike. Mike got married this year. Both my brothers have two kids apiece. Amusingly, I have all girls, brother two had a girl and a boy, and Mike has all boys. It kind of makes a fun picture. Four one way, three the other. Ought to be five, as I should have four girls. Three survived.

I am the ex girlfriend of a guy I shouldn’t have dated, as he was almost double my age. We didn’t have much in common. I mostly wanted sex and he mostly wanted his mom to think he wasn’t gay. He was. Experimented with polyamory and swinging, and that’s okay by me. I enjoyed both and I wish I hadn’t stopped.

Why did I stop? I left the ex, and rebounded off Spouse, who didn’t want anything to do with any of that because he’s religious. Or so he says. He doesn’t go to church. He stopped before I married him. I tried to make him go back, but it didn’t stick. He had me converted, since I wanted to raise the kids in a one-religion household, but it didn’t stick because I can’t reject the gay in me, and I utterly refuse to consider raising my daughters to think that it would be wrong with them if it was there. And it seems like it is there, so I fucking accept it. Every day. I am proud to have a lesbian daughter. I think God would like her ass, too: he made it, if you believe that happy crappy. I don’t, always.

So there’s another thing I am: I am a very failed Mormon.

Became a mom in 2002. Became a special needs mother in 2003. Became a MOM - mother of multiples - in 2006. Multiple miscarriage survivor. Stillbirth survivor (that was 2002.) Autism mom. Fucking ferocious bitch, if you cross my children and I catch you. I’ll fucking feed you your guts, and I will smile the whole damn time.

Outside of the usual family affiliations and the world affiliations - I’m a student at a university and I don’t have a job - I am a knitter, and a reader, and I can crochet but I hate having to watch the stitches. I also write. I write a lot. Or I did. Kind of broken for the past few years, and I really resent that. Spouse turned my whole world inside out and I am not down with the changes. I hate the changes. I hate that he has not noticed I hate the changes.

I believe volunteer work is a necessity for everyone.

I fucking love my car. One day I’ll get a license. Until then, well, I have a car. And it goes vroom!

I love my major. It won’t make great money, but social work is a good solid place to come from. I wish I’d found out about it, say, 10 years ago. I wouldn’t change the kids.

The kids are great. The spouse, though…we had a shitty patch shortly after the twins came, when I had postpartum psychosis, and I should have left him then. Things were bad, and he kept piling it onto me. I pulled through, but not because of him. If I’d leaned on the strength I had then, I would have left and I would probably be okay now.

We have had far more bad times than we have ever had good, and a lot of that is his decision not to meet me halfway. He throws down a gauntlet and I fucking serve it back to him. We are not a team. We cannot work together. It’s more like a long-term babysitting job. I wish his mother would come get him. He probably does, too.

So I’m a failure at marriage. This might have been because I should not have gotten married at all, but ex kind of jilted me, and I wanted to rush right into things and “pick up where I left off.” Just, I didn’t pick the right guy. And it’s showed.

I am a lesbian in a sexless heterosexual marriage, a mother of three kids, none of whom are precisely “normal” in any sense, and I’m owned by a massive number of cats.

My favorite movie is Strictly Ballroom.
My favorite music is pop, but I also like classical music remixed with electronic elements.
My favorite novel is Terry Pratchett’s “Small Gods.” But there are lots of runners-up. Sometimes I like one of them, instead.

One day, I want to not be lonely.
My primary relationship is with my children. We all snuggle a lot.
I secretly wish I could live in a dorm at school, but I’m 40 - shit ain’t gonna happen.

I fantasize that Spouse and the roomie will hit it off romantically. It’d be great for both of them. And for me.

My biggest dream is to be published.

I think that’s about all of me.