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Last night I had a good night and today I did too. I am really exhausted though, last night one of kittens Frida got outside and we couldn't get her back in the house and then we couldn't find her.  After my friends left our house all I wanted to do was lay down in front of my garage all night, and I did for a little bit.  A younger part of me was really sad, worried and I couldn't sleep.

The kittens are feeling more and more at home in our house but they still are not sure about us petting them. I've been reading up about adopted cats who have gone through a lot before they are adopted and it can be a long process before they know that humans are safe.  But of what I've read they do eventually and so we are taking it day by day giving them lots of treats and we talk to them a lot :)

Anyways this afternoon my son's found Frida meowing and hiding in the garage and got her back into the house, we wonder if she was in there the whole time.  So even though I am tired I am really grateful she is safe now.

I still can't leave any comments, I love you ladies and am thinking about you all lots!

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No cats at art camp- but Bat is here with me.

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This is my mother in law and I.  It has been four years today since she killed herself, and even though it has been four years it is still really hard and sad for both me and my husband.  We've been to her grave and we end up laughing a lot because she is buried next to some guy whose last name is Ashpole. And my father in law told us he knew the man and the name fit.  And that made us laugh some more which I know makes her very happy wherever she is.  I do feel her with us a lot and I always knew she loved me and believed in me. 

For a long time I just wanted to go to her grave and dig her out and shake her alive, because I felt like I needed her so much. And honestly when she was alive she drove me completely nuts at times but I still loved her and needed her. I know she is in truly a much better place, many people feel people who kill themselves are selfish that bothers me, I don't feel my mother in law was selfish, I feel she had so much pain. It blocked any good she could see about herself, which was incredibly hard to witness for all of us that loved her.  I wish she was still with us tremendously, I didn't feel like it was fair that I had to loose her but I know she really is in a much better place.  And my feelings have been healing I have many people in my life that support me and believe in me, especially her son and I know that makes her glad.

I now can say without a doubt I feel one of the most important and greatest things we can do in our lives is sit with other peoples pain.  Just sit with empathy, compassion and equality.  I have learned the more I can do this with myself the more I can do it with others and the more I can do that with others the more I can do it with myself.  That was a gift my mother in law gave me and I gave to her too.

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Tonight my friends Anne and Nicole helped me clean and rearrange my studio.  Hip hip hooray!!! And when we were finished my friend Nicole lit this candle she had brought with her and we held hands and stood around it together and each said some meaningful things about friendship and healing.  It was a wonderful day and I am so grateful. 

And I have a comfy office chair in there now Yay! :)  <3

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I'm hiding shhhh
I'm in disguise.
I'm the butterfly

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I found a stone spiral when I was hiking
My therapist is back but I have not seen her yet
I see her on friday
I feel really panicked about it
She goes away again in august
I am upset that she is going away again so soon
I have a lot of times during the day where I do really well
But I think it is more like the me on the surface is doing well because there has to be a me on the surface that can do well and function well for the kids and so the husband doesn't freak out and I fear he would if he understood how much the many different me's inside feel like they are drowning in pain

When I was hiking I was thinking about did
I was thinking how none of the descriptions of did ever feel like they fit me
I am not convinced I have did
I know I experience the world from a perspective like there are many many different me's
Not like I am one way at work and one way at a party and one way at home
Like there is a me and if that me is at a party she is that me and she is how she is at a party and if that me is  Taking care of the kids then she is how she is taking care of the kids and then if a different me was at a party she would feel different at that party than any other me

And it all gets difficult to explaina nd describe
And most of them/us have our own names and feel like people
Except really a lot feel like fairies and gnomes and elfs and various animals
A lot of this comes from shame

A lot of me feels like humans create so much hurt there is a lot of shame with being human and all the humans who post here are nice humans and humans are not bad or evil they are just another species on earth and it is ok to be human
But inside me the experience is more like a lot of me is really not human
Part of that is not so much about shame at all but is about finding ways to feel safe and for a frightened child it can feel safer to be able to shrink into a tiny little speck of a fairy and hide within a tree and be invisible

I guess more than feeling like I have did I feel like I have neens and that feels like there is this walking talking human form and inside it is full of kids and teenagers and grownups and fairies and gnomes and elfs and cats and rabbits and all sorts of things and really it sounds like more than it is because really inside anyone can be anything and there can be shifting and changing and yeah
I feel more like I have neens than like I have did

I worry that if I post this people will be angry with me

I don't know when I will have a working laptop
I am not in a big rush to replace my laptop because with it broken I find myself spending more time drawing and more time being in the world and less time escaping into the internet
I do more with my kids and am more focused on my kids
I do plan to get a working laptop again but I don't have the extra money and so it won't be for a while and hopefully when I do get it I will be able to use it less than I had been using my laptop before it broke

 

This weekend I am teaching a collaborative drawing class as part of my local freeskool. I really like the whole philosophy of the freeskool. I also really like teaching classes. Anyone can teach and classes are always free. 

I have made this too long. i post it now

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My laptop is broken too right now. I can't seem to leave comments, but I love you all and I am thinking of you.

  I want to post, I need to I want my life to be my own.  I haven't been doing well.  Fathers Day was really hard,  days before were and now the days after have been.  I think I am ready to be open about my feelings of my relationship with my father. I have been emotionally suffering I can admit that,  for days now I have been loosing time.  I have been feeling like my life isn't mine, either I have to go numb and keep my psychical surroundings as safe as possible or I am going through my life in deep emotional pain.  And I know now that when I loose time it is a flag that I need to really face my feelings and figure out a way for me to do that safely.  I also bought a pack of cigarettes and smoked them.  The wanting to smoke is like a light switch for me, when I am doing o.k. I don't want to smoke at all and when I am not I do want to cope with cigarettes. I have been making changes with smoking lately, instead of smoking cigarettes I have been using a electronic cigarette -vaping, using cinnamon sticks and I have a mindfulness and quitting smoking book that has been good. Also therapy, mediation, art, friends and journaling have all been helpful. Jenny told me she thinks of smoking as sending out smoke signals, to yourself. That was helpful, a great visual in my mind. For me sending out smoke signals tells me I am in emotional overwhelming pain and I am breathing it back in, feeling that I am not able to communicate these feelings. This has been a way for me to understand myself, be kind to myself and to know of another warning flag that I need to take care of my emotions and self.  To take steps to communicate how I feeling to myself and others.

This is hard to write and has been hard to come to terms with.  My father did not physically or sexually abuse me, he did however neglect me emotionally.  And when I needed a father the most he emotionally abandoned me, he had his work.  I didn't feel protected by my father and through our adult relationship I've realized I can not count on him to understand that my emotional safety and boundaries are important to me or that he respects that. That has hurt, I have been coming to terms with this.  I don't want to but I am now because as an adult my emotional safety is valuable to me and my emotional, sexual, and physical safety should have been valuable to my father when I was a child.

I have wanted my father to be a different father and he has wanted me to be someone I am not.  This is the pain I have been feeling and not wanting to feel for days.  My feelings, opinions, beliefs, choices, struggles in my life have been disappointing to my father many times. Too many times.  Sometimes I knew he was proud of me but that was conditional. I, who I am has been disappointing to my father. That is shame. It was also( like all abuse that happens) unpredictable, and I have chosen not to live with that anymore - in the state of is my father going to approve of me or am I doing something that he disapproves of.  My self worth is not dependent of what my father thinks or feels about me and I am seeing how much of my self worth was.

Something inside of me and outside of me has been urging me to surrender this.  That disappointment or disapproval is not about me or who I am, it never has been about me or who I am. I don't know why my father has treated me the way he has, I don't expect to ever know. That would involve him facing his own self and life and seeing that he can make a lot of different, better, loving choices than he has. I have also decided to surrender that hope that he would make different choices.  That hope has hurt me,and it has not been me being true to myself now or to the little girl who was his daughter. And that is valuable to me, being true to myself and the little girl that I was.

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I went to post this from my phone. My laptop is currently broken. I went to post this and was distracted and looked down and it looked like I had messed up other peoples posts and I started to panic. So I got on my husbands laptop and came here and it looks like everything is ok.

I went to a friends house and she has been doing some sort of trauma release exercise where you do these exercises that make shake and the body shaking is supposed to be the body releasing trauma release. We where doing this and my body was shaking and I started feeling really spacy and little and I was focusing on the ceiling more and more so I stopped.  We spent some time talking then I came home and here I am.

I am still feeling really little and like a lot of different me is all sort of near the surface.

My therapist returns tonight and then i won't actually see her until friday but she will call me once before friday. That is related to so much of the different ones of me all being around and stuff too. It feels like a lot of very young ones of me are all around a lot right now.

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These are a bunch of photos that were taken on Saturday with my friends that I really wasn't o.k. with at all till this morning. I made a decision to work through my feelings about how I felt about how I looked in them and post them.  Body acceptance, living in my skin, feeling my own body sensations and knowing that this is safe for me now as an adult, is and has been a major ongoing process in my life. I have been taking one step in front of the other but sometimes I really slide backwards, all these photos except the bottom one were hard for me to look at with out being majorly critical of myself. I didn't take the photos and I didn't have control.

I have realized any photo where I am with other friends I feel bad, it doesn't matter what size or shape they are I see and feel their beauty but I feel abnormal when I look at myself in the photos.  With these photos it first started out in my mind that I look and I am fat. Then looking at the photo with the three of us, my friends, Amber and Ethan, my mind started telling me my thighs look like a science experiment gone wrong.  ABNORMAL. My body is abnormal.  And that's were this goes for me to me being abnormal and right back in time.  It goes flying past ugly, pretty, fat, skinny right to that part of me that believed I was abnormal, not human and not good. Loads of shame. Too much shame, to overwhelming anymore.  I lived long enough in this body of mine to know now I am human as much as everyone else. I may not always feel it but I do know this more than I ever did before.  I can listen to myself and express the parts of me that go to that place of not having any worth inside me. Those younger parts of me need validation, needed to be heard and I can listen to them now.  I read on a blog  I am reading through, that a friend introduced me and my husband too... someone commented " I can take over where my abusers left off."  Wow, really true.

  I now can allow room, space for myself to talk to myself within myself, take action, communicate, again express myself and comfort myself.  Myself and other parts of me that want to take over to heal myself and not abuse myself mentally anymore I can allow them and trust myself . Be kind to myself.

How do I feel about the photos now ... I have been crying while writing this and still am but it is good.  I look at the photos and I see myself normal again. I feel much better about them and myself.   I see a women in them, me :) who had a fun, safe afternoon with friends where I could be me and they could be them.  And that is beautiful to me.

Also the other evening I was going to a party with my friend Amber and I told her, I wanted to ask you if it was o.k. for me to feel pretty tonight? I felt insecure, unsure and not completely safe about feeling pretty. I knew what her answer would be, yes and that was her answer, I know Amber loves me.

My friend Megan sent me this great blog post yesterday it meant a lot to me and I think it's just really so good.

xoxoxoxo<3

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I feel like it should be morning still but it's not it's four in the afternoon.  I don't want to take a photo of myself today. 

This is my husband   <3

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mixed, aRound

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yesterday I wrote a really long thing to go with my post. part of it was about how much I hated my hair and part of it was about how I was focusing on hating my hair to avoid thinking about how much I hate fathers day. Today I got up looked in the mirror and I like my hair a LOT. I put gobs of gel in it before going to sleep so now it is sticking up like a case of bad morning hair and I am so pleased. I won't go on and on about my hair. I will just say that right now at this moment as I type this I do in fact like my hair vary much. I do hate fathers day. I am about to go make pancakes for the father of my children and for my children and for me. I love him. As for my fathers. I have 2 one a step father who was a sick messed up man that probably is long dead but I have no way of knowing because his name is so common I can't really look him up and when I moved out he had absolutely no interest in staying in touch with me which in retrospect I think I am grateful he had no interest in me once I moved out because the interest he had in me when we shared a home was really creepy and bad and toxic. My biological father. I don't know what to say about him so I will just say nothing about him for now. I may go put just a bit more gel in my hair and see if I can't make it a little more fluffy and then I will go make pancakes.

Last night my head hurt a lot where my brother once pulled out a handful of hair leaving a small blood bald spot. One some level I do very much just want to shave my head as my way of swearing at fathers day. One some level some of the very young ones of me would desperately like hair long enough to braid. What happens to the hair will be decided later,

I hope that you are having an ok day.

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My friend Amber and I ...today has been a good one <3 xoxoxoxo

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My laptop is broken. It is difficult to post with my phone.

I am really struggling tonight. I keep having thoughts that I should die. That it would be better for my children to have no mother than to have me for a mother. I will not act on these thoughts and I know at least some of this is related to fathers day this weekend. All sorts of confusing conflicting memories coming up. I am just really struggling. I have large amounts of time where I am doing really well but mixed in are the moments like right now where I feel terrible.

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Dear Jenny I miss you too LOTS :)))   

Love you ladies

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Hard day today. But good things mixed in there too.

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13 this was my confirmation photo.  I don't know how I felt about being confirmed,  I wrote a paper on the second coming of Christ I don't know how I felt about writing that paper or the second coming of Christ, but I knew what to write. I knew what to write to make him proud.  My dad is a minster, I remember our church growing up.  It was/still is an old building it felt like a big building to a little girl with rooms leading into rooms. Expansive. There where many places to explore and hide in that church. I would run around after the services with friends or by myself.  My dad read The Chronicles of Narnia series to us at the kitchen table when I was growing up, I would pretend a closet or a room in the church could open up to another world. That was one of things I liked most about church growing up.  There was also this older couple who went to our church who my sister and I got to spend time with at their house, another set of grandparents to us.... I wish I remembered more of my time spent with them.

 I also remember I really liked my watch in the photo, it was a Swatch watch, it felt big and black on my arm. And the hands glowed in the dark. There is something comforting to me to know I do remember things about my childhood that just were safe or maybe, I guess that I do just remember some things.

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(I found this image on Tumblr- no idea where it's originally from.)

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