relationships

After almost 4 years, living in 3 different places and countless fights, I'm so finally done with my relationship with Nik.

Everything had calmed down for a little bit, but then we got into a physical fight where I was thrown on our tile floor. Two days later I was physically attacked for laughing at him.

Maybe, just maybe I would have considered making up with him (because I have a high tolerance for this b/s growing up in an abusive home) but thankfully, I had someone who I could tell about what happened, which made it impossible to stay. The Friday after he threw me on the floor one of my co-workers started asked me how I was doing. I had every intention of lying to everyone, even though I felt sick and dizzy, even though every bone in my body hurt and it was almost impossible to do the physical aspects of my job. For some reason I showed him my bleeding and bruised arm. "Drunk?" he asked. "No..." I didn't even have to tell him what happened. He knew. His smile turned into the most pained and sad look anyone has ever given me. "Oh honey, you have to do something about that. Let me know if you need anything." He walked away for a few minutes, but returned to ask me if I had money saved up and my basic plan for leaving.

As I grow up, I look back at pictures and memories of my childhood, and reconcile them with the knowledge I am learning as I mature. I have learned that my mother is not a saint, though she refuses to give up hope that I will view her that way. My nana is a generous woman in need of forgiveness and friendship. My father was living in a world of lies throughout my childhood and has matured into a man I'm proud of.

But most of all, I'm learning that my family is screwed up, which is completely normal.

Every few weeks I learn something new about my family, and I have to incorporate it into who I am. The more I learn about my family, the more I feel I was destined to become the person I am, even though I feel like a disappointment to my mother. She was raised a hippie, as I was, but she has drifted so far from her roots and my nana's teachings that I don't think she knows how to listen to trees anymore. She says 'it was just a phase,' but I think I am who I am because she (at one point in her life) thought it would be important to fill me with feminist, environmentalist values. And now she's disappointed that I don't have a five year plan (which I do, it just changes about every three months).

September is here, and that means it is spring time in New Zealand. I have not really spent much time in New Zealand over the last two years, and as much as I have tried to resist enjoying my time here, with the changing season I have also noticed myself starting to refer to it as home once again. Each day I have spent here since being back from overseas I have been making an effort to reconnect with this country and the people here who I left without looking back two years ago, especially the Women in my life.

When I left high school I made the mistake of moving out of home and finding a place with my best friend and her boyfriend. This may sound nice, but I now understand why people often tell you not to move in with friends, but that is a story for another day. Leaving home however was fantastic. I worked at the market everyday after school to save up enough cash to get out of the town I lived in and move myself into the city, hoping to disappear into a new life there but I guess the tides don’t change that fast, and I quickly found myself completely isolated, even though I was surrounded by thousands of people. So I left and went overseas.

I am currently in the midst of assignment madness at school, but wanted to pop in here to share a recent experience which I found quite interesting...

I have recently discovered that ex boyfriends sending you the lyrics to "Nothing compares to you" is just creepy, and a bit screwed up. Especially when you have a) have not seen the dude for a good 2 years (emphasis on GOOD), and b) I would rather stick my hand in a blender than revisit our relationship. This may sound harsh, but I am just way past being with someone simply because I am alone, I don't need a guy/girl in my life to complete it.

It has been so long since I wrote I feel as if I am starting over. And that's kinda where my life is right now, I'm just starting over. I turned 19 and feel as if the adult world (something I've longed to be a part of my entire life) has knocked me down with the weight of its reality and now I'm lost in a world of worries. Mine, my boyfriend's, my step-mom's, my step-sister's.

Today I want to talk about my step-mom's worries: On August 7th my 11 year-old step sister Emily Pearson died due to complications of keytone acidosis, caused by her type one diabetes. I don't think I have ever witnessed more grief than I saw the day her ashes came home, and my step-mom, Ankh, fell apart and said "she weighs less now than when she was born." I thought in that moment I heard her heartbreak.

I am here and I am not here.

This weekend I was dumped.
Like a baby in a rubbish dump.

Via text message.

I know, I know, but don’t cry for me Argentina, he clearly was not the one (or the ten, if I may be lucky enough to have so many loves in my lifetime). By way of explanation for so abruptly bringing our 5 month getting-to-know-you dance to an end (if you can call anything within a 160 character limit an explanation) he typed “I guess your feminist dialectic jus pushed this sucker out of the yard”.

Backstory: the background to my mp3 player is an image which includes the text “My Marxist-feminist dialectic brings all the boys to the yard.” I thought it was cute. He noticed it once or twice and remarked (what I thought was casually) about it. Something along the lines of “Uh-oh, you’re a feminist,” at which point I think we riffed for a couple of minutes about castration and how he should be scared. Stupid me, I thought we were joking around, I didn’t even go into my speech about how if you believe women should have equal rights then you’re a feminist too. Honestly, that is the extent of all talk about feminism in the time that we hung out. I just assumed (again, stupid me) that since he was young, educated, liberal, since we were on the same page about a lot of things that we were on the same page with this even though he clearly didn’t want to stand under that scary banner of feminism.

I have had an an odd relationship with (who once was) my best friend since we met. We met when we were like 7, because she was new at school and I was assigned to show her around and be her friend. It worked, we became inseparable. We grew up together, both of us had big issues at home, I never really told her any of mine, but she knew I had some, where she told me everything and often we would escape to the park or library and not come home for hours after dark. I lived with her for a while, with her and her boyfriend, and my boyfriend Nick who stayed with us often but didn’t actually live with us, this is where things went wrong. One of my first posts here at the AGA was about my escaping that house. I remember being so glad to leave and be safe and away from all of those people. Then I went to Canada and to Asia and decided to come back to New Zealand and go back to school, and being back in my old city lead me to meeting up with my friend again.

The other day, I was in line getting some food when I observed a man filter through the line and chat with the other customers. He was clearly homeless, and he was telling some half-willing listeners that he heard voices. Welcome to Chicago: an obscene number of homeless here are mentally impaired in some way or another.

I smiled at him as he walked by, because it is habit and good manners to smile when people make eye-contact. He did a double-take and stepped back, flashing a huge grin at me. "I like that smile!" he said.

We had a five-minute conversation, during which we shook hands, exchanged names, and talked a little bit about what I did, as per his questions. He was friendly and intuitive... but when he sensed that I wanted to step aside and retrieve my food, he said, "Please. Just smile at me for another two minutes."

“That Girl”

I am not that girl
Not supposed to be that girl
Emotions a-whirl
Does he like me? Does he want me?
Wondering “where is he?”
Not where he said he would be
Next to me,
Touching me.
Hand between my knees ‘till I think
That I can’t see.

I keep “that girl” inside of me
Won’t speak her into being free,
Into being real.
Can't let you feel
Trapped,
or judged
or whatever it is you guys are supposed
to fear
So much that you can't deal
With "that girl" when she kneels
at your feet.

Don't want to feel weak
or needy
or greedy,
like some kind of freak

This is a little bit of a backtrack for me, but I haven't really had a venue through which to discuss this.

I'm currently involved in my second serious relationship with a man. (There is also a woman in my life, but that's another set of entries.) This simple fact comes with a whole load of tangles for me, and it's hard to get a starting angle on it. I'm in a really blurry place with regards to my sexual orientation, which used to be a clean-cut feeling. (Yyyeah.) I swore, after my first hetero relationship, that I could never be with a (cis) man again--but that had a lot to do with the fact that I attached myself to a man I was not physically attracted to, and who was much older and held a very unhealthy power in the relationship. Largely, there are certain aspects of my feminism that I just feel can never have a happy place in a hetero relationship, unless I stumble upon a man who's been hardcore ingrained into the feminist movement long before I showed up on the scene.

So my ex left for the Air Force on Tuesday. Hard enough in and of itself, to see someone who holds such an important part of my life and heart, leave, knowing that I will probably never see him again. But, try adding on that for the past eight months he has been dating someone who was my friend for fifteen years.

Needless to say, she has decided that it is too uncomfortable to talk to me. I think she hates the fact that I was there first. I was his first for so many things, and she can never replace replace me in that regard. I think it makes her jealous. So she has said a handful of words to me on twice as many occasions, which has effectively ruined the friendship that endured most of our lives. I have tried to talk to her, I really have. I've sent emails, tried to get her alone at school. She just turns red and leaves or ignores me.

At Scarleteen I routinely hear from young women who are feeling insecure about their boyfriend's use of porn. For me, what stands out about these women is the pressure they feel to satisfy every one of their partners sexual needs. That pressure appears to be internal - their partners are described as quite comfortable with an independent sexuality, e.g. their use of porn and masturbation. I've always thought of these women as unnecessarily jealous, making a big deal out of something relatively minor. It's not like they were taking a feminist stand against porn -- they just didn't want their partners using it.

Today I worked a 9 hour shift at our local health food store. Tomorrow is Rosalynn's first birthday party at my sister's house and she would like us to be there by noon, for a party that's at 2 . Which means I will be getting up at 10, if the baby doesn't get up before then. I still have at least a cake to make, maybe two. Things to clean, diapers to wash and a baby to take care of. My boyfriend is busy sleeping.

Even with Nik not working (he lost his job), working part time and having a baby is a juggling act and a hard one. Partly because I am still expected to act like a stay at home mom, while at home, while I am also expected to act like an employee at work. In both cases I am thinking about other things, while in both environments. Both are causing me to space out completely. I almost charged someone $1,116.00, instead of $116.00 in groceries this morning. Oops. When I left I forgot to check my schedule for this up coming week, I hope I don't forget to call in and ask.

According to Broadsheet:

Rutgers researchers Laurie Rudman and Julie Phelan surveyed 242 American undergraduates and 289 older adults and looked at men's and women's "perception of their own feminism and its link to relationship health, measured by a combination of overall relationship quality, agreement about gender equality, relationship stability and sexual satisfaction" (to quote the press release). And guess what they found? Women who said their guys had feminist beliefs had "healthier" relationships. Men who had feminist partners reported "more stable relationships and greater sexual satisfaction."