Processing Pregnancy & Baffling Biology
With my third love, Porcupine, I was essentially a house-spouse without the marriage part. We had a dominant-submissive relationship. He told me what to wear. I obeyed and enjoyed obeying. He told me what he wanted me to do while he was at work, which I also enjoyed. He sometimes walked me around on leash attached to a spiked collar. (Not as a puppy fantasy or anything like that, but just as an ownership thing.) We enjoyed a fair bit of S&M.
.
He worked sixty hours a week, and I literally didn't have friends back then. I had my mom to talk to, and that was about that. I was resistant to driving, and only grudgingly got my license because Porcupine guilt-tripped me into it. He said, "You're really letting me walk in the snow to work, with my laptop on my back, through the ghetto... When you could be driving me to work and picking me up."
.
And so I started driving him to work and picking him up. Often I'd get there to pick him up and he'd be gone, or he'd say, "Oh, well, I'd like to go hang with the boys tonight." And I'd be upset he couldn't call to say that. There were ups and downs in that relationship, big time.
.
Point being though, I spent over sixty hours a week alone back then. Yet in many ways I was happier with that arrangement than the arrangement I have today with Paladin (my fourth love, my husband).
.
Something about being the "wage earner" is upsetting to me on very deep levels. It shakes my sense of identity, of value, of worth, of how much I could possibly be loved, and connects with so many other issues... Like repressing my emotions, sexuality and creativity.
I had interesting dreams this morning.
.
In the earliest dream I can recall I was playing around with Eagle in my mom's kitchen. I was so happy he was in my life dancing with me, playing with me. I asked if we were a secret or not. I've been wanting to ask him that in person for a long time. I guess there isn't really a "we" at all anymore since he never contacts me. Although he said he has trouble reaching out to people.
.
In a later dream I was having some sort of gathering at my house, only my house was quite different. Many people were attending the gathering, including people I hadn't yet met before.
.
In the dream one girl mentioned some things about child-raising and pregnancy I felt were quite untrue. So I explained to this young girl why I didn't want to have children.
.
Beaver was there. I said to her, “Not that I'm trying to say being a mother is bad or anything. In fact, if everyone made the same choice as me, humanity would die out. Perhaps you'll have enough babies for the both of us,”
.
Beaver raised her eyebrows and shook her head, “I have enough, thanks.”
.
There was a boy there I had just met and I spent a lot of time cuddling with him and grinding. I was aroused but said I wasn't interested in going farther.
.
I said to him, “What if you could just enjoy the arousal with no need to go farther?” He had trouble with that. I said, “I used to be like you. I couldn't just enjoy each stage of the process for what it is.” He didn't really appreciate this and suggested that perhaps I was a lesbian.
.
I dreamed that Ferret had just become pregnant at the gathering. I was having a dream within a dream where she and I knew spiritually that she was pregnant. I was getting guidance that the baby was very spiritually important to the planet. I woke up and Ferret was moaning in her sleep (this is still within the dream) and I woke her.
.
My mom came along and had a hissy cow about Ferret getting pregnant while staying at our house, and about how that would look to the outside world. There was some music on loudly. Yelling over the music I said to my mom, “Get out of this maya where you think image is more important than the spiritual significance of this not-yet-born child!”
.
I think it is significant that pregnancy appeared in my dream like that. Both that I talked to the one girl about how having children was awful and how I defended Summerlee's divine experience of becoming pregnant. I'm finally starting to emotionally access my feelings about pregnancy. My fears about it, my spiritual feelings about it, and so on. I used to think I'd need to have children by now or else I wouldn't be able to have them safely. I'm glad I've learned that many women have their first baby in their late thirties or early forties without a problem. It is a matter of your physical and emotional health - things I will undoubtedly be richer in down the line than I am now. I have time to decide.
.
.
I woke late today, nearly noon. I stayed up past 4am last night writing Ocimum.
.
I reflected to him, "It seems that days when I work are much harder to get through than days when I don't. I guess that should be sorta obvious or something, but I hadn't realized just quite how true it was. It isn't that I don't like work in general, but I intensely dislike doing work that doesn't best utilize my skills for somebody who doesn't really appreciate me for who I am. I know that getting employment where you are appreciated for who you are is pretty damn rare... Hence why I had made up my mind a long time ago (quite sagely) that I ought to be a housewife."
.
I actually like White Whale, who I work for. He's a nice guy. I've had sex dreams about him before, which seem to simply symbolize how much I respect him and like him. But he doesn't begin to see me for who I am, and it is incredible how much this pains me.
.
I've been having a hard time finding the line between emotional processing (releasing emotions productively) and wallowing in old hurts as well as newer hurts. I spent years not "letting" myself ever get depressed, and so this strange state of being where my feelings are just beneath my skin is scary. I feel naked in a way that no amount of clothing can help with.
.
The world of emotions is my new "playground" now... I deflected many questions Ocimum asked me about health-related stuff with this: "The various things I've learned about the body don't really interest me right now. I'm a bit too struck by how much more result I've had from emotional processing than dozens of supplements, therapies, "techniques," foods, herbs, juices, and so on over the years. I've tried a hell of a lot of things, and I'm really down about it. Feels like I wasted a lot of time learning so much about biology, nutrition and all that whatnot when I could have just been learning to get in touch with my own feelings."
.
[frowns and shakes with frustration] I concluded, "Hence, I'd rather not write out the answers to your questions about various things along those lines. I can tell you about my experiences (first hand and second hand from friends/family) and my research in person though."
.
Later in the letter I went on to say, "Also, I've integrated a lot of what I learned about nutrition and biology technically with what I've learned experientially. This causes me to say some things that make no sense to people who don't know me pretty well. It makes all the effort I put into learning about this subject so useless it makes me want to curl up in a ball, under a rock, and cry until I'm a dessicated, crunchy thing for bacteria to nom on like a kale chip."
.
Yesterday my mom asked me a bunch of questions about what supplements I was taking. Her experience is that supplements fix things. My experience is that they rarely seem to make an impact large enough to notice, even when taking large amounts of them.
.
I feel like it all a bunch of moot information. Later on in this letter to Ocimum I went on to say, "I've read studies that say cooked food is more digestable. But I have yet to read a study that says all the aspects are more digestable. Oh, hell, I said I wasn't going to write about this. Because it really doesn't matter. I can read studies and quote studies, but it doesn't heal anybody, or myself, or do anything useful at all."
.
Yeah. It is hard for me not respond to statements and questions about food/nutrition. I learned all that stuff so that I could respond, so that I would have something to offer. [feels the tears coming on]
.
.
Ocimum wrote me essentially his life story (in a rough sketch, of course) in his last letter. Nearly 5,000 words in length. It was delightful to read. It incredibly turned my mood right around. It also prompted me to post something last night. It is something I wrote a year ago which talks about how Paladin and I became polyamorous. I have often used it as a "pastie" to send someone in a letter when they asked me about my experience with polyamory. I brushed it up and added some relevant notes and posted it here.
.
Ocimum said, "As far as the emotional processing technique, I'm very curious about it, since it seems to have done so much for you. I'm always a bit resistant to anything that offers seemingly miraculous results, because it seems to me that if it were so universally useful, word would get out pretty quickly and widely, and I've been introduced to plenty of supposedly miraculous techniques that either do nothing, or do harm."
.
I replied, "Yes, same here. I think that different techniques work differently for different people. I've met people who've had amazing results from a wide array of techniques. There is EFT, Transactional Analysis, the macrobiotic diet, the 80-10-10 diet, hypnosis, and so on. But then, it is hard to say. There is what people say, and what they do, and what they feel, and what they experience, and sometimes those are four fairly different things.
.
"I have only known my loves deeply enough to say what has really worked and not worked for those four people, myself and my parents. So in reality, I have the "full story" for only seven people. That isn't a huge data bank to work from. Although I'm getting to know Oryx and Hare so well that in time it might be nine people instead of seven. But even Dolphin, who I now know quite well, I wouldn't presume to understand what "works for her" in terms of her body, her emotional health and so on. It takes a lot of discussion and experience with someone to understand that stuff.
.
"And so, these days, I'm hesitant to try to teach anybody anything anymore. I used to be very enthusiastic about converting people to better lifestyle choices in one way or another, but... Now it just seems more useful to listen and get to know people and see if there is anywhere where my needs meet their needs happily."
.
Paladin and I talked a bit last night. I'm glad we did, because it seems like he's been somewhat hiding himself from me on an emotional level. It needs to be safe for both of us to share ourselves fully (with some discretion as to how and when, of course). That is what we both ultimately want.
.
He expressed fear that if he shares how he feels or says "no" to my requests that it may be damaging to my health, or may lead to me deciding I'd be better off with someone else, or at the very least, might lead to me not feeling open to share with him my wants, desires, feelings and so on, because I'd be too busy worrying about how he'd respond.
.
Of course there is some truth to those fears, but I feel like his fear of sharing is growing to be a bigger problem than any of those things he is afraid of. Like many fears, the fear itself manifests what one is afraid of through one's behaviors.
.
I tried to bring him around to seeing that without being pushy and while letting him have his own emotions and expression about those emotions. It is tricky for me to stay in touch with myself and also hold space for his expression at the same time, but I feel like us both learning to be able to do that would be incredible. What if we could trigger each other and still be okay? Still talk about it right then and there?
.
I kinda had that with my first love, Wolf. I wasn't so repressed then as I have been, and Wolf was in desperate need of opening up to someone. He'd been through severe abuse and had recurring nightmares which stopped when he started living with me.
.
Ocimum said if I were to travel with him he'd like it if sometimes we spent time apart, each doing our own thing, "all the more because that sounds like a challenge for you. Maybe it would be easier if someone in a dominant relationship with you insisted, and you were doing it for them..."
.
I replied:
.
[chuckles] I really liked being in that sort of relationship in the past. With my third love, Porcupine, I was essentially a house-spouse without the marriage part. And we had a dominant-submissive relationship on many levels. He told me what to wear, which I enjoyed. He told me sometimes what he wanted me to do while he was at work, which I enjoyed. He sometimes walked me around on leash, but not often. (Not as a puppy fantasy or anything like that, but just as an ownership thing.) We enjoyed a fair bit of S&M.
.
He worked sixty hours a week, and I literally didn't have friends back then. All of the people I know now, I didn't know then. I had my mom to talk to, and that was about that. I had some people I chatted with on Instant Messenger (mostly Squirrel), some long-distance pen-pals, but nobody in person except a couple distant connections through my parents. I didn't have social things I attended except a Writer's Group that my mom and I joined together.
.
I was resistant to driving, and only grudgingly got my license because Porcupine guilt-tripped me into it. He said, "You're really letting me walk in the snow to work, with my laptop on my back, through the ghetto... When you could be driving me to work and picking me up."
.
And so I started driving him to work and picking him up. Although, that got me pretty angry, pretty fast. Because often I'd get there to pick him up and he'd be gone, or he'd say, "Oh, well, I'd like to go hang with the boys tonight." And I'd be upset he couldn't call to say that. He never called to tell me things like that. :(
.
Annnyway... There were ups and downs in that relationship, big time. Point being though, I spent over sixty hours a week literally alone back then. And in many ways I was happier with that arrangement than the arrangement I have today with Paladin (my fourth love, my husband).
.
Something about being the "wage earner" is upsetting to me on very deep levels. It shakes my sense of identity, of value, of worth, of how much I could possibly be loved, and connects with so many other issues... Like repressing my emotions, sexuality and creativity.
.
My first year with Paladin was similar to my experience with Porcupine. Paladin worked more like forty-five hours a week, but that time I didn't even have my mom to talk to and I literally didn't leave the apartment while he was at work. I once walked to the store on my own after my health improved, partly to prove to myself that I could, but that was once in an entire year.
.
So I can be alone... It isn't really being physically alone that is a problem, as you said. And being with someone else definitely is not an automatic fix by any means. Sometimes people make me feel more lonely, actually.
.
That has often happened to me after potlucks. I get home feeling needy and desperate for alone time with Paladin to get more of what I really crave from human relationships - authenticity.
.
That was pretty much the conclusion of the exchange between Ocimum and I last night. Moving the focus back to today - Tuesday. This is the day of the week I usually work the most hours... But I really want to do some sewing today. I have not done any sewing in a couple months now, except to make my mom a neck-warmer for her birthday. I have a wicked-cool idea for a dress. If it comes out the way I imagine it will, I'll want to have it before I attend the polyamory gathering a couple weeks from today.