Inside, I’m laughing, but also rolling my eyes.  I said, “Why did Dad tell you not to tell me that?”, thinking, “He knows I do the opposite of what you say”, or, “‘Coz you sound a leeeetle bit crazy right now!”  She said, “He knows that you’ve been hurt in your past affairs, well, you know what I mean–”. I interjected, “Relationships.”  She went on as if she hadn’t heard me, “And he doesn’t want you to get hurt again.  He’s very protective of you in that way.”  That was the cringe-worthy part.  I shrugged it off, but I also felt a flash of pure anger.  Protective of me?  What the fuck is that shit?  Still, I said in my head, “A good man is better than God, apparently!” and moved the conversation to another topic.  This is huge because even a year ago, I would have gotten into it with her over her words.  Now, I can just say, “Whatever, Mom,” and go about my merry way.  And, as friends pointed out, if she thinks she had a hand in me meeting the ape, she’ll be more for the relationship.  And as another friend said, “Let her nag God.  At least she’s leaving you alone!”

All right.  Back to my narrative.  When we last left the titular couple, they were climbing Mount Everest, swimming in the Amazon, and–oh, all right.  They were at taiji and meeting with the grrl’s best friend for dinner.  Which went swimmingly.   We closed down the Thai restaurant, causing the manager to push a vacuum noisily past us as a hint to get the fuck out.

Then, Friday.  Idle’s last full day here.  We planned on getting Indian food (his favorite) and visiting the Snoopy statues around St. Paul.  We didn’t manage the latter, but we did do the former.  My absolute favorite Indian restaurant got raided and closed years ago.  Three others have come and gone, but couldn’t hold a candle.  The one to which I took Idle was very good, though–except for one thing.  It was ninety degrees out that day, and the restaurant didn’t have air, for whatever reason.  It was brutal, especially since both of us do not like the heat at all.  Sometime in the evening, I started saying, “It’s not so hot.  It’s not bad at all!”  Idle looked at me and kindly said, “You’re hallucinating, honey.”  Apparently, part of being dehydrated is entertaining delusions.  I didn’t care ‘coz at least I didn’t feel as if my brains were being scrambled in preparation for the zombie apocalypse.

The weather broke while we were in the restaurant, waiting to pay.  Idle had gone out to smoke, and he said it looked like rain.  I have to say, as I watched him walk away (nice ass, by the way.  Yum), I was bursting with pride that he was my man.  I loved walking around with him by my side–absolutely loved it.  I thanked the powers that be who brought him into my life (including ABL) as my skin melted off my bones.  Afterwards, he asked me about the cuisine in general in MN, and I said it was bland and not very spicy.  He said that when I go visit him in Ottawa, he’ll take me to an authentic Indian restaurant.  Yum!

Then, we went back to my place after picking up some beer and celebrated Canada’s Day.  Or, as he insisted on calling it, Canada Day.  I had my customary one beer (OK, half) as we sat on the porch, smoked, and talked.  We held hands or had our hands on each other’s knees, and there was no place I would rather have been than with my ape. The night had pleasantly cooled off because of the rain, and it was so peaceful sitting outside with Idle.

People who have known me for some time know that for most of my life, happiness was not what I was seeking. To me, happiness is a fleeting emotion, and it’s to be cherished when it happens, but not sought after. No, for me, my Holy Grail was peace. I just wanted to feel serene, calm, and at peace with myself and the universe. When I was the deepest in the abyss, I quietly gave up hope that I would ever find any serenity or peace in this lifetime. But, that’s exactly what I find with Idle, even over the intertubez. Just chatting with him on Skype soothes my frazzled nerves (and by chat, I mean typing ‘coz neither of us likes the phone), and that’s especially helpful with my mother here for her yearly visit. The feeling of peace that came over me was especially strong when he was here, though. My mind, always going at hyperspeed, would slow down and just go twice as fast as most people’s with a touch of his hand. And, after an explosive session of sexing in which he’d made me come a time or a dozen, my mind, body, and soul would all be aligned and at peace. I would have a hazy, melty, blissed-out feeling that, from what I’ve been told, some people experience during meditation*. I had no desire to do anything or think anything. I didn’t feel I had to jump up and take a shower (as I used to a long time ago). I didn’t have to talk if I didn’t want to, but I could if I felt like it.

This feeling didn’t just last for a few seconds or even a few minutes–no. It lasted until we went to sleep. Or rather, he went to sleep. I know it might sound like not a big thing, but he gave me the gift of a quiet mind, and I treasured it very much. As I spooned him while he fell asleep, I would match my heartbeat to his, and I would just be content to touch him and to breathe. I’m usually someone who has to do three or four things at once–it was incredibly relieving to only have to do one, at the most, two.

Then, the day I was dreading was upon me. Saturday. It was hard. I’m not going to lie. Driving him to the airport was fucking hard. Holding his hand as he slowly made his way through security? Even harder. And, when I had to let go so he could go through the gate? Killed me. I was numb as I left the airport, and somehow, I made it home. I felt something was missing, though, and that something, well, someone, would be him.

I’m not going to lie to you. Being away from my ape is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Yes, I’ve done long-distance relationships before, but never with someone with whom I actually had a future. By the time Idle left, we both knew that we wanted to be together; we just had to figure out how to make that happen. To that end, I am visiting him in three weeks to check out his fair city, Ottawa. After that, we will discuss the pros and cons of Minneapolis v. Ottawa, and then we will make a decision.

We. It’s still a little weird to say that, to think of myself as part of a team. Weird, but wonderful, too. From a very young age, I learned that the only person I could rely on was me. And, to be painfully honest, I couldn’t rely on myself much, either. But, for as little as I trusted myself, I trusted other people even less. And, because I was so fucked up, I chose partners who reinforced my view that love was not to be trusted–and neither were romantic partners. I’ve never really thought of myself as part of a we, even when I was in a steady relationship. I chose partners who would eventually leave me, therefore, I felt justified in never fully trusting said partner. A neat little vicious cycle I had trapped myself in without fully being conscious that I was doing it.

In addition, I saw what my parents’ marriage had done to my mother (or how she was in it because I can’t say how she was before it), and I wanted no part of that. My father treated her like a maid/housekeeper/all-around-drudge, and he bristled any time she tried to hold him accountable to her or to the family. Then, when I discovered feminism, I had the perfect reason for eschewing marriage. It was the feminist thing to do! Patriarchy! Mantle of the oppressor! And, there was the fail-safe position of, “Well, I couldn’t marry a woman I loved, so I’m not going to marry a man, either!” Let me hasten to say that these are all legitimate reasons to be wary of relationships and marriage in particular, but I was using them as excuses so I wouldn’t really have to examine the issue. My best friend and I used to discuss marriage back in the day (she’s been married for as long as we’ve been friends), and any time I would complain about this or that about marriage, she would say, “Marriage is what you make of it. You get to decide what marriage means to you. You and your spouse.”

I pooh-poohed her at the time because I was deep into my “relationships fucking suck” mentality, but I have slowly started to see that she’s right. I don’t have to do X, Y, or Z while in a relationship because women are expected to do it or because I think I should do it. It helps that Idle doesn’t have many preconceived notions about relationships, either–except that once you commit to a relationship, you work hard at it. I can get behind that!

I feel like I’ve known Idle forever, and yet, I’m learning new things about him all the time. I marvel at how much change I’ve made, just in the short time we’ve been together.  Silly things like the public declarations of affection I make on his FB wall, mostly through videos, not to mention the very fact that I have my status as in a relationship with Idle Primate.  That may not seem like a big thing, but it kinda is.  If you had told me a year ago, no, six months ago that I would be in a relationship and declaring it thus at this point in my life, I would have laughed in your face.  Or, in my mind so as to not be too rude. I was skittish of even contemplating a relationship, let alone declaring myself in one–and loving it. We call each other by endearing nicknames–this is another thing I never would have done two years ago.

A big one: I see myself as having a future–one starring him. Or rather, starring us. In the same place (be it Canada or the US or elsewhere) within a year at the very most. I see us living together at some point soon. Let me pause and repeat that: I see us living together. WTF? This from the woman who declared she would never live with someone (what is it ‘they’ say about never saying never?)! We’ve discussed marriage, and I haven’t run screaming from the room, my hands over my ears. Again, WTF? Who is this woman? I can barely recognize me sometimes.

Another big change is the fact that I chose to be with a man who has a history of committing to his partner and who is happily monogamous. He’s not someone with one eye out for the better thing, never quite content with what he has. He loves me, and I know this (I really do, and that’s another new feeling for me), and he wants to be with me. With me. No ifs, ands, or buts. He wants me to be his primary partner–no, he wants me to be his only partner–and I can’t tell you how wonderful that makes me feel.

More to the point (yes, another big realization), he is the only man I want, too. I’ve pondered monogamy and nonmonogamy for much of my life. I can see the value in both, but my realization is, I’m a one-person person. Part of the reason I hesitate to love is because I do it so deeply when I actually do dare to love. And, I could give many well-thought-out reasons as to why I have chosen monogamy, but the bottom line is, this is who I am. I can be happy in a polyamorous relationship as long as I’m the primary partner, but I think I am more wired to be monogamous. I’m not sure about how hardwired it is in me, and more to the point, I don’t really care. I want to be monogamous with Idle. That’s all I need to know.

It’s been a long journey to get to this place. I am a person who has regretted much of my life, but I would not change a thing if it meant not being with Idle right now. I don’t know where we’re going (literally and metaphorically) or what will happen in our future, but what I do know is that I’m ready to finally take a chance on love.

P.S. I decided to post this without much editing. Why? ‘Coz.

P.P.S.  The videos are songs that are now ours.  The first, there are three versions.  My favorite is the original by Depeche Mode, which I posted on his wall; his is by the band that is comprised of pin-up girls, The Saturdays; we both like the Nouvelle Vague embedded in this post.  The second video is one that the ape posted on my wall.  The third vid, I posted this version on his wall after he posted the original by Abba on mine. The fourth is a song I posted on his wall. It’s one journey’s end, but just the beginning of our journey together.

*Not me. I hate meditation, as I’ve expounded on before.

Where was I?  Oh yes, musing about having Idle in my life.  More on that later.  For now, more on the rest of his visit.  We’re up to Wednesday, and I have to share with you an odd detail about me:  I hate the end of things with a passion.  If I’m watching a TV series on DVD, I will delay watching the last episode because then I have no more left to watch!  It’s so bad, I start the countdown when I am halfway through the series (if there are not a large number of episodes).  Take, for example, Miracles.  There were only 13 episodes made of the show.  When I hit 7, I became increasingly morose with each episode viewed because it meant I had less to watch than I had already watched, if that makes sense.

I’m the same way with trips (at least, ones I want to take).  When the midpoint arrives, I start becoming depressed thinking about the end of the trip and how soon it’s approaching.  It’s funny because my friends were shocked I’d let Idle stay in my house for eight days (so long!), and all I could think of was, “I wish he were staying longer.”

Wednesday was the halfway point of his trip.  I pushed it to the back of my mind because I wanted to enjoy his company to the fullest, but it was lurking like an evil, lurky thing.  We went to my therapy session–or rather, I went to my session and he wandered around St. Paul, the lesser-known of the Twin Cities, in the ninety-plus weather we were having at the time.  After my session, I joined Idle in the wandering, and we checked out some of the local shops.  Oh, he also got excited about the Snoopy statue we saw in front of a nearby vet’s office ‘coz he’s a big Peanuts fan.  Charles Schultz is from MN, and they did a series of Snoopy statutes to commemorate something or the other in relation to him.  We saw another one further down the street that had been vandalized.  Poor Snoopy.  Idle didn’t have his camera with him, so I said we’d do a tour of the statues.  We didn’t get to that, but hey, it gives him added incentive to visit me again, amirite?

We went into a neat local boutique called Bibelot ‘coz the ape likes soap.  I had told him I didn’t like scents of any kind (‘coz I’m allergic to everything), but I neglected to say that some natural soaps are actually soothing to my poor, afflicted nose.  Nevertheless, I wasn’t really into soaps–I view them as utilitarian.  Idle has a very keen sense of smell, and he collects soap.  In Bibelot, I started sniffing one soap after the other, and I was really drawn to one (apple pear).  I held the bar to my nose as we walked throughout the store, and when I gave it to Idle to smell, he commented on how the bar was warm from me holding it to my face.  That pretty much sealed my fate; I had to buy the bar after that!

I need to interject something here.  Idle and I have both had shitty childhoods and traumatic events happen to us later in life.  Yet, despite that, Idle has the ability to find beauty and joy in seemingly mundane things.  He also has a childlike glee that is infectious.  We started a series of inside jokes that to the outside ear would have been outrageous.  As a survivor of trauma, though, I found it a relief to be able to joke with Idle about some of the horrors in life.  It was also healing in a way.  Being able to crack wise about terrible events allowed me to put some of the trauma where it belonged–in my past.  Cops are notorious for their gallows humor, and Idle and I engaged in something similar.  We both knew that it was only appropriate for the two of us, but we couldn’t help muttering joke after joke under our breaths whilst out in public. We did this in Bibelot, and it felt really good.  We weren’t disruptive–just boisterous.  We were partners in hijinks, and it was so much fun.  

Another telling point:  I was cooing over some three-legged pigs because I collect pigs (I was born in the Year of the Pig).  I regretfully put down the one I was holding because I have a ton of pigs, and I did NOT need to buy another one.  Idle picked up the pig, looked it over, and commented about its origin.  Unlike me, he didn’t put it down.  I didn’t think anything of it as I just assumed he was taking it home as a reminder of me.  You astute readers probably can see what’s coming–he gave it to me when we got back home.  I was touched because that was such a sweet thing to do.

After we were done in Bibelot, we went to Garden of Eden, another local boutique, to see more bath stuff.  I don’t normally hang out in St. Paul, so it was cool to see one of my cities with my ape in tow.  I was having a blast smelling soap after soap, something that would have befuddled me if you had told me about it merely a year ago.

That night, I was feeling a bit melancholy when my mom called.  Now, conversation with my mother is always strained.  Idle slipped outside to smoke, and I gritted my teeth and took the call.  I had laid down the law some time ago that she was NOT to mention my weight as she had no concern about my health–only my looks.*  She adhered to the letter of my edict, but not the spirit.  She talked about going to a clothing shop and buying things for my niece (who is tall, thin, and gorgeous).  She added, “Of course, I couldn’t find anything in your size”, and my esteem plunged.  After a few more minutes of noncommittal chatting, I hung up and went outside to smoke with Idle.

I thought I was OK, but later, after we went inside, I suddenly burst into tears and clung to Idle as if I would drown.  I told him it was because he was leaving, but my reaction was out-of-proportion to his departure.  As he said, I was crying as if I would never see him again.  He figured out that in the deep recesses of my mind, I was afraid the one visit was all we had.  It had nothing to do with Idle at all, but with my past.  I was used to people leaving me.  In fact, I picked people who were unable to commit, in part because I was dicey on commitment myself.  Still, the end result was that subconsciously, I expected Idle to return home and say, “That was fun.  We should do it again!” and then disappear or fade away.  Again, it had nothing to do with him as he has shown no inclination to bolt. Additionally, I realized in retrospect that talking to my mother had made my vulnerabilities sharper, and my intense reaction to Idle’s departure was in part a response to said situation.

Still, it was difficult for me not to obsess over the fact that Idle was going to be leaving soon and that it would be some time before we saw each other again.  I’d done long-distance relationships before, but they were under different circumstances.  There was no possibility of a future, so the long-distance, while frustrating, was actually an integral part of the relationship.  With Idle, the distance is an obstacle to be overcome because we do have a future together.  I don’t know what that future will bring, but at least I know I have one now. I’m terrible with delayed gratification, and the thought of being apart from Idle after just having found him was almost more than I could bear.

So, Thursday.  This was the big day.  I was taking him to Taiji, and he would get to meet Choolie, my teacher (there was a substitute on Saturday). After that, we would meet my best friend, Kat, at Sen Yai Sen Lek for dinner so she could vet him properly.  He was nervous about meeting them.  I said that Choolie was very gregarious and that Kat was one of the sweetest people he would ever meet.  She’s very good at putting someone at his ease, and I had no doubt she would do the same for Idle.

Class was a bit nerve-racking for me.  I am one of the senior students, so I sometimes tutor the newer students.  This includes teaching them new postures.  When Choolie called me over to work with one of the newer students, I was nervous because I did not want to fuck up in front of Idle.  Fortunately, the posture I had to teach was really early in the first section of the form–it was one with which I was comfortable.  I am a pretty decent teacher, if overly concerned with doing everything perfectly (me, not the student).

One of the other students was someone from my Saturday class.  She’s a dynamic, Indian (from India), sixty-year old woman who reminds me of my mother from time to time.  She came late to class, so I didn’t get a chance to introduce her to Idle.  She admonished me sternly for it after class, and I was abashed enough to call him over and introduce the two of them.  She gave me a taste as to the reaction of my mother when I tell her about Idle.  Idle has asked me what my parents would think of him, and I was sad because I had no idea.  I could imagine my mother being anything from elated that I was with someone and not TOO old to have the babies (no) to being disappointed because he’s not a MD neurosurgeon/pastor/ Taiwanese/Christian/doesn’t want kids/etc.  As for my father?  No idea.  And, honestly, I don’t particularly care.

After we chatted a bit with various people in class, we walked over to the restaurant.  Kat was meeting us later, so we ordered right away.  Kat came breezing in, and it was as I said–she put Idle at ease.  He was still nervous, but he told me she was easy to talk with.  Later, she told me that she really liked him and could see the four of us (including her hubby) hanging out.  I could, too.   They had an easy rapport that boded well for future encounters.  Nothing sucks more than having your best friend and your partner be at loggerheads.  We shut down the restaurant and went outside to smoke and chat.  Kat had to leave early-ish the next morning to drive to Iowa, otherwise, we would have continued the conversation elsewhere.  As it was, it was a very pleasant night.

So, to recap, two of my closest friends met Idle and approved of him.  More to the point, they approved of the way he treated me/thought of me.  Score!

Oh, there’s another important thing:  We had two arguments, and I didn’t react as I normally would.  I have been trained that my opinion isn’t important.  When I have a serious disagreement with someone, my tendency is to withdraw, avoid, or go cold.  I’m not particularly proud of that trait, but it’s how I handle adversity.  Or rather, it was.  With Idle, I was able to look past my own hurt and see that he was hurting, too.  One time, he said something hurtful, but I was able to see that he hadn’t meant it the way he said it.  He was in a vulnerable spot, and he hadn’t phrased what he wanted to say in the best manner.  But, he wasn’t trying to be malicious.  So, after I went to the bathroom to, well, pee and to cool down, I returned.  He had slipped outside to smoke, and I so wanted to go out to him, but I was afraid.  This was right after he said the hurtful thing and before any explanations.  What if he was disgusted by me?  What if he thought I was more trouble than I was worth?  I was paralyzed.  Later, I found out that he was having a hard time of it, too.  Coming back in the house was difficult for him, and I am glad he was the bigger person in making the first move.

We had a lengthy, serious talk about what had happened, and we were able to talk about it in a constructive manner.  For once, I was more concerned about us than about me.  That’s not to say that I am a doormat–I’m not.  It’s just, I gave him the benefit of the doubt, and we were able to work through the pain.  That helped me see that it was OK for me to speak my mind in a non-accusing, nonjudgmental manner in order to work out our problems and issues together.

On a tangential, but related note, I am utterly enjoying being part of an ‘us’. I told Idle this earlier in the evening, and I admitted how strange it was to me. I have spent most of my life fiercely declaring that I was an island (Guam, to be precise) and that I wasn’t part of anything–least of all, a couple. The bonding part of me was broken pretty early in life, and it’s taken me this long to slowly, painfully, painstakingly put it back together again. Now that I have, I am tickled by saying things like, “After I visit you next month, we have to decide what we’re going to do to be together.”

We’re a team. I like that.

Whoops! Running long again. I’m going to post this as is and start part five sometime soon!

P.S. Videos, top to bottom: A scene from Truly, Madly, Deeply, one of my favorite movies of Alan’s. It has Alan Rickman AND cellos! Idle posted this clip to my wall, and I loved him even more for choosing the right Alan Rickman clip. Nina Simone and Barry White because Idle and I love both of them.

*I can say this for certain because not once did she murmur any word of concern when I was anorexic/bulimic.

By the way, have you noticed that where I left off, with the hug at the airport, makes both a perfect ending and a perfect beginning?  Chew on that for awhile as I regale you with what happened during the actual visit.

Idle and I hugged for what seemed like forever, but was probably only minutes.  He felt solid, comfortable, warm, reassuring, and just so damn right in my arms; I didn’t want to let him go.   I did, reluctantly, and we were on our way.  I had to focus on the road, of course, so I didn’t get to stare at him as I wanted.  I did catch him staring at me when he thought I wasn’t looking, and it didn’t really fluster me as it normally would.  I pointed out things of interest on the way home, but I wasn’t really thinking about my city.  I was giddy with happiness and lust that the ape had finally landed.  It didn’t seem possible that we were actually in the same city, my city, in my car, driving back to my house.

I was nervous, yes, but I was also just overjoyed to have him with me.  We stopped at Subway because he hadn’t eaten all day, and then I drove him to my house.  I am uncomfortable having people in my house for many reasons, but I was so eager to be with Idle (and touch him), I managed to quash the small panic I had as he walked into my house.

How did the cats greet him?  In their usual way.  Raven sniffed and let Idle pet him right away, and Shadow stood aloof.  But, I am very proud of my shy guy because he didn’t leave the room.  And, he did let Idle pet him the first day.  By the middle of the visit, Shadow had accepted this stranger into our household–probably because Idle awoke before I did and would go to the kitchen to make coffee.  Those with animals know that any time you go into the kitchen, the animals think it’s feeding time.  By the end of the visit, Shadow was planting himself in front of Idle and arching his back–his way of demanding to be pet.  Raven accepted Idle as another piece of furniture and would flop all over Idle, sometimes at inconvenient moments.

Back to the narrative.  After we ate, Idle and I retired to the bedroom so we could get to know each other better.

Now, as longtime readers know, I have body issues.  I don’t like my body at all, and I have only recently begun to feel like I’m not totally gross.  I am a big woman.  Even when I was at my skinniest, I had broad shoulders, big boobs, sturdy thighs, and thick calves.  To Idle, all this was a plus.  He likes women with meat on their bodies and with lots of curves.  The first video is one he often posts to my FB wall.

As we explored each other’s bodies, he made it very plain that he was hot for my bod. And, I was just as hot for his. I like my men big and solid with broad shoulders and big hands, and he had it all in spades. I loved the scent of him, the taste of him, the feel of him, the sight of him, and the sound of him. We spent many hours just finding all the sweet spots on each other’s bodies. Wouldn’t you know that he found a few new ones on my body (and inside) that I never knew I had? Erogenous zones, I mean.

Our attraction was electric and primal. He simply had to touch me for a few seconds, and I was ready to sex him up. I couldn’t keep my hands off him, even when we weren’t sexing, and he felt the same way about me. We managed to keep it under control when we were out and about town, but in my house, all bets were off. We were on each other all over the house, and I never wanted to stop touching him. One thing I loved about sexing with him is that it was by turns gentle, primal, tender, torrid, passionate, sensual, and animal.

Idle and I both have rich and varied fantasies. I have tried to rid myself of mine for decades because I thought they stemmed from dark and horrible places. I wasn’t comfortable with that part of me until Idle and I started talking about our respective fantasies. He was gentle and nonjudgmental, and I was a little less ashamed of my fantasies. I tried to do the same for him, and being able to explore those deepest, most private parts of ourselves together brought us even closer. I have my issues with Dan Savage*, but I heartily endorse his GGG (good, giving, and game, but I thought it was good, giving, and generous) as long as both partners are equally so, and Idle felt the same way.

I will touch more on the sexxxing throughout the piece, but there’s one important thing I need to say now–I loved having him in my bed. This is revolutionary because I am a shitty sleeper and have preferred to sleep alone for most of my life. When I did sleep with a partner in the distant past, I couldn’t bear to be touching as we fell asleep. Or, more accurately, until the other person fell asleep. I cannot fall asleep before my partner. Is it a safety issue? No. I snore, and I’m very self-conscious about it, so I trained myself to not fall asleep first**. With one of my exes, he would lie on his side, and I would be behind him by a foot and a half or so. I would have one hand on his shoulder, and that’s as much as I could stand touching him (or anyone in general) as I slept. One night, he turned to spoon me, and I immediately went rigid. I wanted desperately for him to turn back the other way so I could have my space.

With Idle, I wanted to be as close to him as possible. I would spoon him until he fell asleep, and then I would just look at him and touch him to my heart’s content. Since we both sleep very poorly, we would take naps whenever we wanted. Thus, I could watch him in the waning daylight or in the dark as I have better vision in the dark than many people. I would watch his chest rise and fall, and it would comfort me. Sometimes, I would place my hand on his chest as he breathed, and sometimes, I would match my breath to his. That always made me feel better and more connected to him.

I would watch as he tossed and turned, and my heart would go out to him. I wanted to soothe his troubled sleep, but all I could do was stroke his arm or chest to try to calm him down. When I found myself getting tired, I would put on my gear (eye mask, mouth guard, and ear plugs) and then snuggle up against his back again. I would curl my hand around his belly (or lower) until I fell asleep. He would wake up before I did, and the first time I woke up to an empty bed, my heart fell to the bottom of my feet. Where was he? Where had he gone? It turned out that he didn’t want to disturb me, and he had crept out of bed to start the coffee. Then, he would sit on my porch and drink his coffee as he waited for me to awaken. I have a kick-ass porch, if I do say so, myself.

Anyway, he later told me that he would wake up and hear me grind my teeth in my sleep (I bit clean through my last mouth guard). When he put a hand on me, I would quiet down. He said it would be the same way if I was tossing and turning. He would put a hand on me, and I would be soothed. Once, he bumped me and apologized. He said I put my hand on his arm and said it was OK. Just as he was about to say something, I snored. I don’t remember any of this, so apparently, there is a part of me that never sleeps–no wonder I’m so fucking tired all the time.

When I got up, he would pour me a cup of coffee, wait for me to nuke it ‘coz I like my hot drinks boiling, and then we would go out on the porch and just sit and laugh at the golfers as we leaned into each other. I have to say, this was the image I had in my mind most often before the visit. Yes, I was looking forward to the sexxxing and the physical intimacy, but I was most anticipating just being with him in the quiet moments of the day.

I took him to visit Northeast Minneapolis–the area in which I feel most comfortable and want to live. My Taiji studio is there as is the Eastside Food Cooperative, and I always feel like I can breathe better when I’m in my ‘hood. He visited my Taiji class twice (more on that later), and we had Thai food in a neighborhood restaurant, Sen Yai Sen Lek, that is eco-conscious and gets much of its ingredients from said local co-op. After we ate, we would walk around the neighborhood.

OK. I just have to say something. It’s not very feminist of me, but I LOVE the fact that Idle is big (6’2″ and sturdy) and knows how to fight. I know, I know, I am woman–hear me roar. I can take care of myself, and in fact, I am currently learning how to kill a man with my bare hands. Yes, yes, yes. It’s true that I can do for myself, but you know what? I’ve had to be on the alert all my life, always vigilant for danger. I’ve done it mostly on my own, and it’s really really nice not to have to be strong all the time. When Idle was here, I could let down my guard somewhat, knowing he had my back. When I walked down the street with him, I felt safe and protected. It’s not a feeling I have often, and it’s one I really, really liked.

More than that, I was so damn proud to walk down the street with him. He’s my man, and I wanted to shout it to the world. Yeah, I felt like I was strutting my stuff with him on my arm, but so what? I know I sound more like a teenager than a grown woman, but he just makes me feel so damn giddy and blissful, I have to crow about it a bit. OK, a lot.

The second video I embedded is Natural Woman by Mary J. Blige, and it’s a song I often post to Idle’s FB wall. I am not very feminine by society’s standards. I like sports, dislike shopping and other ‘girly’ things, don’t wear makeup or shave…anything (I’m Asian!), and I have little interest in clothes. I don’t wear any scents as I’m allergic, and I don’t do anything to my hair other than brush it. I am not maternal in the least.

Idle looked at many of those things as positives (he likes natural women), and he really does make me feel feminine, sexy, and desirable. In return, he is exactly the kind of man to whom I’m most attracted–sensitive, yet strong, artistic, creative, funny, sturdy, witty, good with words, tender and tough, sexy and hot, and passionate. Both of us are an amalgamation of characteristics, and we fit together beautifully. The third video below right below is by one of my favorite indy folk duos, Lowen and Navarro. Pat Benatar had a big hit with it back in the eighties or so. I posted it on Idle’s FB wall, and he said it fit us. It does.

You know how much I love this man? I actually went to a movie theatre with him and watched a movie that doesn’t have Alan Rickman in it! For those who don’t know me, this is a big deal. I don’t like movies much, and I really don’t like going to the theatre ‘coz I hate noises, crowds, and people. And I’m claustrophobic. So, for me to go to an actual theatre with actual people to see a movie that has neither Alan Rickman nor cellos in it, well, that’s mind-blowing. Granted, it was the latest X-Men movie and I’m a big fan (mostly of Wolverine), and granted it was the midnight showing with a maximum of ten people in the theatre, but still.

I really enjoyed it. The movie itself was a great summer action blockbuster film with really hawt whips and chains action by Michael Fassbender as the young Magneto, but what I really dug was the date aspect of the whole event.  I haven’t dated much in my life, and it was really nice to go to a movie, hold hands, and just be immerse in the experience.  I can’t remember the last time I went on a date to the movies, but I do remember that seeing Pulp Fiction with a guy and telling him what I thought of it caused him to dump me. So, yeah, me and movies–not a good combo.

Going to the movies with Idle, though, was loads of fun. I realized during his visit that there were many things that were infinitely more enjoyable when I was doing them with him. Even something as inane as surfing the ‘net for stupid videos (protip on being a good girlfriend, ladies. Make sure you shave your legs EVERY DAY so your stubble doesn’t hurt your man’s delicate skin! It’s true. I saw it on the internets!) was a blast when shared with Idle. This is something I’d forgotten–how much my daily life is enriched by having a partner, specifically Idle, in it. I like it. I like it a lot.

Hm. Getting long again. Go figure. I will end this for now and leave you with this teaser: Idle met two of my closest friends who are like family to me and survived the experience! Tune in for the next episode of A Grrl and Her Ape, coming to you sometime soon.

*Don’t ask. I would have to write a whole post about it, and I’m not in the mood.

**My brother once told me that I had a funny laugh, and I stopped laughing out loud for years. Self-conscious, me? Never!

As we last checked in with the grrl, she was anxiously awaiting a visit from her ape.  When he told me (the grrl.  Try to keep up) he had bought the tickets, I was jubilant.  In the back of my mind, I was afraid that he would back out at the last minute.  I couldn’t quite believe he actually WANTED to see me, so much so that he would fly a thousand miles to meet me.  He hates flying as much as I do; he hates change as much as I do; I was floored that he was actually going through with it.  With my history, I have a hard time believing that I’m worth someone making that effort, especially someone as averse to traveling as he is.

Once we had establish that yes, he was coming for realz, I had to do something I hate:  Clean.  I absolutely loathe it.  Plus, I suck at it.  Not a good combination.  I’m not comfortable having people in my house, not even good friends, and here I was eagerly offering Idle Primate to share my bed.  My friends were floored by the fact that I was letting him stay in my house.  Frankly, so was I.

As I prepared for his visit, doubts started flooding my mind.  I am a dynamo online. I’m funny and witty and charming as hell.  I am MUCH better with the written word than I am with the spoken word, and I was worried that all my neuroses and quirks and idiosyncrasies would be annoying in person–not endearing.  The demons were whispering in my ear that once Idle Primate spent some time with me, he would realize that he had made a mistake.  I didn’t want to disappoint him.  One thing that made it marginally easier for me not to panic was that I knew he had similar worries about disappointing me.

We have some of the same life experiences, which means we have similar issues.  We also both think of ourselves as the caretaker in a relationship, which makes for a very interesting dynamic.  In the past, I’ve tended to be with people who, in the long run, didn’t want to be with me as much as I wanted to be with them, and then my concubine nature would take over and I would do whatever it took to make them happy.  Idle has a similar personality, which is actually refreshing.  We both wanted to make the other happy, which is much better than one person doing most of the work.

As his visit neared, we started to post more on each other’s FB walls.  Mostly videos, and mostly ones that one of us found funny.  We have a rule that we had to listen to the entire song if the other person posted it on our wall. As we both have devious minds, it led to lots of mirth, especially as neither of sleeps very much and one of us has OCD (that would be me). For example, as I said in my last post, I loved the hair bands of the ’80s such as Cinderella and Warrant.  My poor Idle, well, let’s just say he was a punk back then and leave it at that.  In our serious moments, he posted the video Home by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros.  I had heard the song before and hadn’t been immediately captured by it, but through my new lens of love, the song had a resonance that it lacked before.  I felt such a strong connection with Idle, being ‘with’ him was like being home.  I wrote a brilliant essay many years ago (as it’s not online, you’ll have to trust me.  It’s quite possibly the best thing I’ve ever written.  Pulitzer Prize worthy) about how I found ‘home’ in people, rather than places, and I felt it strongly with Idle.

I was in a tizzy because nothing about our relationship was like anything I’d ever experienced before. I’ve loved and been in love, yes, but this was something entirely different. I was different in this relationship, and it flummoxed me. As I have said, I am a control freak with OCD who likes to map things out in excruciating detail, think things over (too much), and then slowly, agonizingly make a decision.  Not this time. We went from taking things off Facebook to meeting in real life in roughly three weeks. For me, that’s a blink of the eye. Now, arguably, I’ve been working all my life to reach this point (much like I talked about getting cats for years before I suddenly went out and got them. Come to think of it, I did the same with my first tattoo. Protip: Do not get a tattoo at midnight at the only shop open. Trust me on this), but it still is a relatively short amount of time.

But, as time tends to do, it seemed forever to get from talking about meeting until the day he actually arrived. A funny aside, my brother left me a message on my machine saying that my niece had a band camp recital that evening, and she would really like me to be there as she wrote one of the songs. No, he couldn’t tell me about it weeks earlier because that’s not the way he rolls. I did tell him I would ask Idle if he felt up to going, but not to expect us.  The fact that I was comfortable with the idea of introducing Idle to my family, any member of my family, is also a first. In the past, I have kept my love/sex life completely separated from my family (and friends, really) for a variety of reasons. With Idle, I wanted him to meet my brother and my friends (he got to meet two of the latter, more on that later) as I wanted him to be a part of my day-to-day life.

By the way, the second video is of Friday as done by Stephen Colbert. I am one of the last people with internet access who has not heard the original, but this became one of our songs. Why? Because he was flying out here on a Friday. Yes, the tuff grrl got all silly and mushy with her ape, just as do most people in love*. It was a bit disconcerting to me to realize a few things–like I love the fact that he is big (tall and sturdy) and strong. Why is that disconcerting? Because as a feminist, I am supposed to be able to take care of myself, thankyewverymuch. I am getting ahead of myself as usual, though, so hold that thought. I’ll return to it later. Maybe.

I was freaking out pretty badly before Idle flew out. He was, too, but not as volubly as I was. We both had thoughts of disappointing the other or not clicking in person or whatnot. The not-clicking part, though, was always on the other person’s part. I was convinced he would not click with me (or more to the point, I knew I clicked with him), and he was convinced I would not click with him. That’s not exactly right. We both thought we would click, but worst case scenario would be as how I described it.  And, because we’ve both been hurt terribly by that in the past, each of us grew increasingly skittish as his arrival date neared.

I was filled with thoughts of him and anticipating his visit.  I didn’t talk much about him with anyone in part because I was having such difficulty understanding exactly what was happening myself, but also because I was feeling a bit sheepish about the whole thing.  I’ve been very vocal in the past that I wanted no part of a relationship, no way, no how.  And, when I started allowing that maybe I wanted one, I insisted that I would not live with the person, that we wouldn’t see each other every day, and that I would be very sedate in the pacing of said relationship.  Still, I didn’t see that I could be in one or that there was someone who could tolerate being with me daily, let alone embrace it.   In addition, dating wasn’t a priority as I had many plans as to what my next step should be.  Meeting someone was not in the top ten, I thought.  But, at the same time, I kept thinking about dating and wanting to meet someone.  It was frustrating.  When I told my therapist about it not being a priority, she said it sounded like it was, even if I didn’t want it to be.

Yeah.  That.

As I drove to the airport, I had difficulty concentrating on the road because all I could think about was meeting Idle.  I am not a good driver in the best of times, and let’s just say it was a good thing the traffic was relatively light.  I got there early as is my wont, and I had a book to keep me company.  I was a mess inside, but I know how to play it cool, and I kept my countenance unruffled.  Hey, I’m Asian.  I do inscrutable perfectly.  I sat down by the international gate and tried to concentrate on my book.  Unfortunately, there was a child sitting next to me nattering on about his/her open, gaping, pus-filled wound.  It was covered with a bandage, and the father (I think)  was lecturing the child to take the bandage off.  This is when said child talked about how smelly and pus-filled the wound was.

Yum.  So not what I wanted to hear while waiting to meet the man of my drea–er, daydreams.  I only have nightmares, so he was not the man of my dreams.  He was the man of my daydreams, and I was hoping he wasn’t really a figment of my overheated imagination.  I waited.  And waited.  And waited.  His plane was early, but he had to go through customs.  I was getting nervous as I stared fixedly at the glass doors.  Suddenly, from another direction, a tall, cute, redheaded man was smiling down at me.  It was Idle!** I smiled broadly and threw myself into his arms and hugged him hard. In an instant, all my doubts melted away. I didn’t feel as if we were meeting for the first time, but that we were continuing a well-established relationship. His scent was powerfully attractive to me, and I didn’t want to let go. I had come home.

P.S.  Running long as usual.  I’mma end this here and will write about the actual visit in the next post.  By the way, I found this totally adorable series of a girl and her ape, and I wanted to use one of the pics, but they’re not open source.  So, instead, I link for you.

*So I’ve been told.
**There are two international gates at the airport, and I always mess up in choosing the gate.

Remember how I’ve written in the past that while I have started longing for a relationship, I never thought I’d find one?  Of course, that was back in the dark ages (MONTHS ago) when I wondered if I was dating material.  I wanted love, but I was deeply afraid that I wouldn’t find it in this lifetime.  I thought the best thing to do was to go to activities that I would enjoy anyway and see what happened.  I would test the water and see what was out there.  I would take it slow and not expect anything to happen for some time.

At least that was the plan.

Funny how things change in a heartbeat.

A few months ago, I got into an epic word battle with a guy on ABL’s Facebook wall.  He went by the name of Idle Primate, and he knew ABL through a cultural commentary site called Pajamas or something like that**.  I don’t know how the great ate debate started, but it evolved into the two of us exchanging ripostes involving words ending in -ate or derivations of.  We went on for hours.  It was a blast, and I included a song that he immediately claimed.  It’s the first video posted below.

He requested to be friends on the FB, and I accepted.  We started flirting almost immediately after, but I was determined to keep it light because he wasn’t in my city or state.  Hell, he wasn’t in the States at all.  He’s from Ottawa, Canada, and I was determined not to get into another long distance relationship.  Sure, he was intelligent, witty, funny as hell, thoughtful, goofy, creative, poetic, and we clicked right off the bat.  Yes, he was single and not afeeeeered of commitment as my past partners have been.  He was in fucking Canada, and not in Winnipeg or anywhere close-ish.  I was NOT going down that road–uh uh, no sirree.

The internet is a funny thing.  It allows for a connection that isn’t based on physical proximity; indeed, I didn’t even know what he looked like since he only had pictures of apes as his profile pic on FB.  Yes, we were both putting our best feet forward, but the real us still came out loud and strong.  We quickly moved to PM’ing each other, and then I suggested we take it off FB because I don’t trust them at all.  No, I don’t trust Google and gmail much more, but FB really is the nadir of privacy.

I soon grew to anticipate emails from him.  My heart would skip a beat if I had one, and it would thump in disappointment if my inbox was stubbornly empty.  Sure, we bantered on FB, but it wasn’t the same.  Still, I told myself that it was just for fun and that I was just practicing my dating chops since I haven’t used them in a long time.  Honestly, I’ve never really dated as I find the concept an anathema–I tend to plunge right into relationships or flings or whatnot.   I was determined to keep it on a fling-like level because he was so far away and the chances of us meeting were slim.   Months earlier, I had decided that I wasn’t going to be the first one to fly to meet, especially not for a booty call.  I’d done that in the past, and I didn’t want to do it again.

Besides, I was going to find me someone local.  It was my new motto:  Fuck locally.  It’s better for the community and for you.  If Idle Primate wanted to fly to MN for some companionship and some sexxxing, that was fine by me.  However, I was NOT going to get involved with a Canuckistani.  No, no, no.  Not going to happen.  I was firm about this in my mind.

Except, I was starting to have more than warm, “come on, let’s fuck” feelings about him, and I panicked.  I couldn’t fall for someone so far away–I simply couldn’t.  But, I didn’t want to give up the connection we had, so I tried to have it both ways.  I continued flirting with him and exchanging intimacies, but I also encouraged him to date locally.  I wasn’t quite ready to date yet (I was looking more for a fuck buddy), and I didn’t want to be unfair to him since he seemed ready to jump in the dating pool.

He called me on it.  I realized that I was being disingenuous in pushing him towards other women.  You have to understand that I see this now, but it was all a muddle at the time.  I truly did want him to be happy because he’s a good man who deserves happiness with a good woman.  I didn’t think I could be that woman, particularly because of the geographical distance, and it seemed churlish of me to stop him from meeting local women.  What I didn’t acknowledge, though, was that I was quickly becoming attached to this man, and I was ruing the distance between us.  Indeed, I hardly allowed myself to even think about it in the privacy of my own mind, let alone voice it out loud.

We were talking every day through Facebook and email.  Neither of us like the phone, so we stayed away from that for the most part.  We did migrate to IM on Skype, and we both found our comfort zone in that arena.  I found it a lot of fun to post videos on his FB wall (hair bands like Poison and Bon Jovi are a guilty pleasure of mine and a bane of his existence), email him a long, intimate email, and chat with him at the same time.  We could talk about anything, and I felt really simpatico with him. He was making a home in my heart, and it scared the shit out of me.  What do I do when I get scared?  I try to shape the situation into something familiar.  What’s familiar to me?  Sex.  And, we had similar fantasies, though in the opposite.  I may go more into that in a future post, but I’m just going to let you stew on it for now.

I admit it.  I freaked the fuck out.  I had made this big declaration to myself about dating locally and blah-di-blah-blah, and yet, I was falling for a man a thousand miles away.  Again, I am much more clear-eyed about this now than I was then.  Then, I just had to try to turn the situation into something I knew and with which I was comfortable.  So, I gave him the now-infamous (between us) speech about the window of opportunity.  I blush a little to think about it in retrospect, but it’s important in getting us where we are today.

I told him that while I knew we were just flirting and weren’t really thinking of meeting (though we had talked about it in more concrete terms), if we did meet, it had to be soon because the window of opportunity was closing.  He was, rightfully, confused, and asked met to elaborate.  I took a deep breath and gave it my best shot.  I said that I didn’t want to do a long-distance relationship because I’ve done enough of those in my time.  If he wanted to come and hang out and have sex, I’d be down with that.  However, if he wanted to do that, he had to do it soon because the window of opportunity was closing.  I was beginning to care about him too much to keep him in that category, and as I didn’t want a long-distance relationship, there was no reason for us to meet after the window of opportunity closed.

Sounds fucked up, right?  As Idle Primate said to me later, “I was thinking, let me get this straight.  I can meet you and be with you as long as I don’t care about you too much.  If I do care about you too much, though, then we can’t meet.”  I winced to hear him say it so bluntly, but that was the gist of it.  That’s the familiar road for me–being with someone who couldn’t or wouldn’t commit to me.  Being with someone knowing there would be an end to our relationship. Being with someone who wasn’t as into me as I was into that person. Did I like the way those relationships unfurled? No. Was I comfortable in them? Yes. And so, because I’m a control freak and someone who really really really likes her world to be small, I tried to force Idle Primate to walk down that road with me.

Idle Primate was having none of that. He wanted to meet me, yes, but he didn’t understand the artificial constructs I insisted on placing around the meeting. He was quite clear about his feelings for me, and by baldly stating them, I had to confront my twisted logic, my fears about caring too much for him, and I had to figure out what I really wanted from him.

I looked past my fears and my damage and realized that I didn’t want to walk down the same road with this man that I had walked so many times before. Yes, it would be comfortable and easy (in a sense), but it would end up with the same result–me alone with a mess to clean up. In addition, he’d been hurt badly by women in the past, and he was too good a man to mess with like that. I had to make a decision–either we stopped talking sexy-sexy and truly be just friends, or I had to acknowledge that the dreaded window of opportunity had already closed. I was past being able to be casually-involved with Idle Primate, if I ever was able to be in the first place. For all my brash talk and all my flirty ways, when I fall for someone, I fall hard. It’s why I tend not to love–it’s really hard for me to stop loving someone.

I made my decision.  I told him to forget my window of opportunity speech and that I wanted to meet him without restrictions. To my astonishment, I meant it. I wanted to meet this man without trying to push him into a previous paradigm. That freaked me out, too, but in a better way than my previous freak-out.

By the way, Idle Primate had posted three pictures of himself by this time on his FB wall. I like men of all shapes and sizes, but he was definitely my type. 6’2″ tall with a solid frame (I like big men). He had tats, short-cut red hair with matching mustache and beard, gorgeous blue eyes, a sexy smile, and really nice hands.   I was immediately physically attracted to him, which was made all the hotter by the fact that I was immensely attracted to him in other ways as well.

I wanted this man. Badly. I wanted him as more than a fuck buddy or a fling. The feelings I had for him, nearly from the beginning, were foreign to me. When he told me he had bought the tickets to come see me, I was filled with joy, elation, fear, and astonishment. He actually put his money (literally) where his mouth was, and I was moved that he thought enough of me to walk the walk.

I was ecstatic. I was burbling over with a mixture of lust, excitement, jitteriness, fear, rapture, and….love. Ah, yes, the other four-letter word–the one that I had such issues with. I was determined not to say it to Idle Primate because it was too soon and we hadn’t met in person and because because because…I held good to my vow for weeks, and it was pretty impressive how I was able to creatively tell him that I loved him without using the actual phrase, “I love you”. But, I did. I knew I did, and while I wanted to wait until we met in person, I realized that it was folly to keep dancing around it. So, one day after he said it to me, I said it to him, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

As usual, I’m running long. I’m just going to end this post there and leave you hanging for the next post about the actual meet-up. Hopefully, I’ll get to it in less than three months!

*That is the extent of the computer metaphor this time around.
**OK, OK, it’s called Pajiba. Sheesh.

After so many years of denying I want anything, that statement is a little frightening.  Scratch that.  That statement is a whole lotta frightening.  I was raised to believe that I shouldn’t want anything.  I am given what I’m given, and that is that.  It’s partly Asian culture.  It’s partly sexism found in both American culture and Asian culture.  It’s partly my family dynamics.

Very OT:  I had a talk with my bro about our childhood.  He couldn’t remember much of what I mentioned (because he’s not in tune with his surroundings), but the one thing I did get out of him was this.  I asked if he remember Dad being home very much.  He said, “Oh no.  Dad was always gone.  Working.  Supposedly.”  We glanced at each other.  I said, “You know about that, too?”  He said, “Oh sure.”  Another glance.  I said, “Supposedly?”  Pause.  My brother, “He had…meetings.”  Pause.  Me, “With women.”  Brother, “Yes.”

Funny how a family secret can be not so secret.  My mother and I have talked about it.  I had a cousin tell me that he knew about it from his parents.  Now, my brother has acknowledged it as well.  And yet, when I brought it up with my father, he…well, he didn’t deny it, but he put his own spin on it.  ”It’s not fair to me for you to say that.  I had many female friends and male friends as well.  It’s not fair to me.”  My therapist pointed out that his response was instructive as to the general pattern of our family dynamics.  It’s the same thing that happened when I confronted my father about the abuse those many years ago.  He said, “I don’t remember it happening.  Wouldn’t I remember it if it happened?”  We are a family of deniers, we are.

Anyway, back to the original topic.

I have always been a bit too much.  I laugh too loudly (my brother told me years ago that I had a weird laugh.  I ended up laughing silently for about a decade after that because I was mortified by his comment); I eat with gusto; I fuck with even more gusto.  I adore the feeling of a hard rain pelting my skin, and I love how a biting cold wind sears open my nostrils, tightens my nipples, and makes every pore sing.  I am a sensualist to the core.  The feel of velvet on my skin makes me want to purr.  The taste of an exquisite chocolate dessert actually makes my pussy pulse and gives me an orgasm face.   Kiki laughed at me when she saw the look on my face one time this happened.  ”That good, eh?”  She asked me as I nearly moaned out loud.

It was that fucking good.  Oh my god.  Silky-smooth chocolate ganache sliding down my throat….It’s making me wet to think about it now.

I hate wearing shoes because I like to feel the ground on my toes.  The grass, the dirt, the mud, the leaves, whatever.  I hate wearing clothing in general because I like the elements against my skin.  Granted, I cannot go outside nekkid very often, but still.  I feel too restricted when I wear clothing.  I want to be free, damn it.

I don’t remember much of my childhood.  What I do comes to me in bits and pieces.  And, given what I know about how my family operates, I treat my own memories with suspicion.  However, I can’t remember ever asking my parents for–anything.  Not for Christmas or my birthday or just in general.  I’m sure I must have, but the memories are suppressed in my mind.

We were Taiwanese immigrants, here by the sufferance of our American overlords.  My parents identified as Taiwanese (still do) even after they became citizens of the United States.  They spoke English to my brother and me, but Taiwanese to each other.  We ate Taiwanese food a lot (with the weekly after-church fast food stop thrown in).  We attended a Taiwanese American church, and we went to all the Taiwanese celebrations.  However, since my brother and I could not speak Taiwanese or Mandarin, we were shut out from the inner sanctum of the Taiwanese society.

Still.  I knew enough to know that I didn’t make sense in the Taiwanese society.  I was a devoted tomboy from the moment I was born.  I hated wearing dresses and playing with dolls.  I wanted to climb trees and play rough games with the boys.  I was also a voracious reader, which comforted me through my lonely childhood and rough teen years.  I have been told that I was an exuberant child when I was two.  I can believe it because the exuberance is still somewhere in me, but it’s lain dormant for so many years.

My mother put me on my first diet when I was seven.  She said I had such a pretty face, if only I would lose weight.  This was the same time as the abuse started (or a year into it, if the latter flashbacks are correct), which is not all that uncommon.  We didn’t have much sweets in the house, but my mom would monitor what I ate.  When I look at pictures of me as a kid, yeah, I was chubby, but I wasn’t fat.  I wasn’t Taiwanese girl skinny, which was the problem.  Even during my fat teenage years, I wasn’t fat.  More rounded than my Taiwanese counterparts, but not fat.

Still, it set a precedence.  I had to watch what I ate because I wanted too much.  I love food.  I love the tastes and textures and how they interplay on my tongue.  I love the feel of yogurt sliding down my throat, and I like the pleasant burn that a good hot sauce will add to a dish.  Note, though, this drink burned my throat and made it nearly impossible to swallow for a day.  I am used to hot foods, so imagine if someone who isn’t drank it.  Granted, maybe I wasn’t supposed to chug it, but no one told me that.  It’s really tasty, but I will never buy it again.

Ed. Note: The previous was written on 10/13/10.  The following is written on 10/14/10.

Good girls don’t.  That has been a theme running in my head lately.  As longtime readers know, I have struggled with what it means to be a woman.  It’s not easy to be pretty much diametrically opposite of what society (and my father) declares a proper woman to be.  For the most part, I don’t give a shit.  Yeah, I sit with my legs uncrossed and I love to watch sports and I hate to shop.  What the fuck of it?

Physically, I’m very feminine with my curves and my waist-length hair.  My voice is masculine–I’ve been called ‘Sir’ on the phone more times than I care to count.  I don’t want to marry or have kids.  Like I said, most of the time, I am perfectly fine with this.

However.  I have started to have a little bit of “good girls don’t” creeping into my head.  Good girls don’t eat whatever they want, whenever they want, however much they want.  There is a popular dieting theory that posits you should have all your favorite foods in the house in abundance.  The theory holds that the first few weeks, you will go overboard on cramming as much food into you as possible.  However, once you realize that you have it on hand and that you can eat it at any time, the desire to binge subsides.

It makes sense.  When I am dieting, all I can think about is food.  When I was deep into my ED, I would surf the computer for pictures of food.  Food pr0n, as it were.  I would look for truffles one day and trifles the next.  I mostly looked at deserts since those are my weaknesses.  I would faithfully count every calorie I ate and log it into my journal.  I would plan my exercise (a moderate two-and-a-half hours the second time around), and I would make sure my activities did not interfere with that pattern.

I have similar pangs of guilt about sex.  I love sex.  I love it so much, I would have it every day all the time if my body would allow it.  I love the feel of fucking and of being fucked (gotta admit, especially the latter).  Sexing gives me an insane amount of pleasure, and I still feel a little guilty about that because good girls shouldn’t enjoy sex  so damn much.  Oh my god.  I’m getting wet just thinking about having sex for hours on end.  I love the feeling of bodies pressed against each other.  I love how primal I feel as I’m fucking.  And, I love how I completely stop thinking when I cum.  I love going down on someone and having that person go down on me.  I love making out before sex.  I love making out after sex.  I love making out during sex.  Have I mentioned how much I love sex?

I know.  That makes me a freak (literally) and a slut (and damn proud of it).  I have realized that there are still lots of guys who are not OK with someone as frankly sexual as I am, so I have made the decision to…not tame my personality, but to be more selective as to with whom I share it.

I think I talked about a discussion at TNC’s place about the sacredness of sex.  Most of the commentators there were saying that sex is a precious beautiful thing and that catting around should be kept to the younger years.  Now, I realize that the magazine for which he writes (The Atlantic) skews conservative (he’s one of the few liberal bloggers there), but it disconcerted me.  Don’t get me wrong.  Sex can be a beautiful, sacred thing between two people who deeply love each other.  When that happens, I am filled with so much emotion, I want to cry.  It really is amazing when you touch another person’s soul like that.

However, sex can also be a pleasurable, really hawt way to release stress and just a lot of damn fun.   It doesn’t have to be sacred every time.  Having a one night stand with a consenting adult (or three) doesn’t cheapen the meaning of sex because there are many meanings to it.  Even with the same person, sex can be fun and playful one time and deep and intimate the next (even in the same session).

Despite my childhood and the horrible situation in Thailand, I have always loved sex.  Ever since my first experience, I have marveled at how good it felt to have something inside of me.  Specifically, a cock (real or fake) in my pussy.  I was made to have sex.  This, I know.  It’s taken me almost twenty years to be comfortable with this fact.  As I said, even during my slut years, I was aware that I was doing something ‘bad’.  I was acting out, and while I enjoyed much of it, it really was a statement more than a way of being.  I hit my peak about a year and a half ago.  Now, I’m ravenous for sex.

I talked about this with my therapist.   I have spent most of my life whittling my life down to a manageable size.  I felt that life was too dangerous to really live it, so I existed.  I endured.  I denied myself most of the pleasures I desperately wanted because, well, just because.  In the past two years, I’ve realized that while I have desperately tried to control my desires, they have always been there, simmering under the surface.  Now that I have started allowing them to bubble to the top, they are almost overwhelming.  I am a hedonist in every sense of the word.  Yet, I am threatened by the same hedonism.  I adore food, and yet, for so long, I couldn’t just eat.  I had to be doing something else as I ate because food was threatening.  In the past, I did S&M because the pain and humiliation was manageable.  I could deal with pain, and I thought I deserved nothing less than the humiliation I received.  It was a turn on, but it never touched the core of me. Therefore, it was safe.  I had a safe word, but I never used it because I prided myself on just how much pain I could take.  Unbridled lust and unending pleasure was threatening, so I did my best to tamp it down.

One more example.  Tonight, I had my first private Bagua lesson from Choolie.  It’s another kind of martial arts, and it’s very complementary to Taiji.  Choolie started showing me a few drills a few months ago, and I immediately loved it.  Baguazhang is down and dirty fighting.  It’s nasty, and it’s cruel, and I love it. Choolie has taught me how to punch properly, and tonight, she taught me how to block a punch, and then what to do after blocking the punch.  I asked her if this is how she would teach a beginning student.  She said, yes.  See, in Taiji, I didn’t learn the applications until after I graduated from the Solo Form.  Oh, sure, Choolie showed us some of the applications along the way, but until we got to pushing hands, there was no sparring and no real study of the applications.  This is actually good because I went into her studio just wanting to learn to defend myself.  I have a hard surface that deflects ninety-percent of unwanted attention, but I needed to know what to do with the other ten percent.  I never shied away from the martial arts aspect of Taiji as that was what I wanted, but it was merely in the name of self-defense in the beginning.

Once I graduated the Solo Form and started sparring, I realized that it was kill or be killed.  I would avoid a fight if I could, but if I couldn’t, I was going to do my level best to make sure the other person didn’t get up and walk away from the fight.  In other words, if I have to use what Choolie taught me, it’s motherfucking on.  That was difficult to accept.  Then, she started showing me Bagua.  As I said, it’s nasty.  It’s meant to be nasty.  It’s meant to take someone out efficiently and with as little effort as possible (which appeals greatly to my lazy side).  Choolie has said that she knows someone will love it if that person giggles as she practices.  Choolie and I were doing a lot of giggling tonight.  I felt a kinship with Bagua immediately, but I told Choolie that two-and-a-half years ago (when I started Taiji), there was no way I would be comfortable with it.  Good girls didn’t have a good time punching and sparring.  Good girls didn’t giggle while learning Chin Na techniques or ten different ways to break an elbow.  Good girls didn’t giggle when their instructor accidentally hit them or they accidentally hit the instructor in turn.

Two-and-a-half years ago, Good Girl Syndrome would have hindered me in my pursuit of Bagua.  Now, it’s a mere twinge.  I love punching and blocking punches.  I love the physical aspect of Bagua.  I can feel the warrior woman side of me emerging, and she is ready to rumble.

This is all very new and slightly overwhelming to me.  It’s not easy adjusting to a new persona.

P.S.  Desire is one of three U2 songs I actually like.  Official video here. Kylie Minogue is a very guilty plesasure of mine, and All the Lovers is a great song.  You have to see the official video (kinda of.  It’s banned in our country, but this is a version of it.  Still cannot embed it) to get why I included it in this entry. I just think Desert Rose by Sting is very sensual.  Official video here.

This year, I was flummoxed as to what to do.  I decided to send a card, but what would it say?  I looked at different cards, and they were all too sappy for me.  I mean, I am not a sappy person anyway, and most certainly not when it comes to my father.  I found a simple one and wrote something like, “Happy Birthday, Dad.  May your year be filled with peace, happiness, and love.  Love, Minna.”

That’s all I could muster.  And, strangely enough, I meant most of it.

You see, in my last therapy session, I talked a bit more about my father’s lack of enjoyment for life.  As I’ve said, he’s traveled around the world, eats the finest food, and doesn’t care for any of it.  He can be excused for his lack of enthusiasm for the countries themselves because he’s mostly in conferences while he’s there, but he gets treated to the best food each country has to offer, and he appreciates none of it.

It got me thinking about what he does enjoy.  He likes watching war movies.  He liked playing tennis (though I think it was more the social aspect than anything else).  Other than that, nothing.  His life is pretty joyless.  Even his affairs were more about validation than for actual enjoyment.  As I have also documented, he doesn’t have much use for women.

The more I talked about him, the more I felt a…stirring of…sympathy for him.  But I will get to that in a minute.

On a wildly different track that isn’t different at all (bear with me), my aunt died a few months ago.  This is my father’s sister, a woman who had nothing but contempt and disdain for me for not speaking Chinese/Taiwanese (but, not for my brother.  Double standards runs in that family, I see).  When my mom emailed me to tell me the news, I felt nothing.  A few days ago, Kiki emailed me to tell me that someone with whom we had both worked many many years ago had died recently.    I had had a crush on him when we worked together, and he had been kind to and admiring of me as well.  I haven’t seen him in 16 years.  Kiki saw him a couple years ago, and she told me then that he had asked about me.  Just a few weeks ago, we were wondering what had happened to him.  I Googled him, but I found nothing, and believe me, that’s very unusual in this day and age.

I was shocked as hell when she emailed me.  He was only fifteen years older than I (roughly), which means he was in his mid-fifties when he died.  That’s so young.  And, I had just been talking about him so recently.  How the hell could he be dead?  I felt something else, too–grief.  Grief for a man I hadn’t seen in 16 years and had thought of not more than a dozen times in the same time period.  WTF?  I saw my aunt in December, and she’s family, and yet, nothing when she dies.  I know intellectually that there is a good reason for this dichotomy, but I still felt guilty about it.

Then, I thought about it some more.  It’s the whole blood is thicker than water maxim at work here.  I mean, I have met this aunt something like three times in my life.  Each time, she has been disapproving of me.  We didn’t speak the same language, and we are of different generations/cultures.   With my coworker, we were from the same culture; we were of a similar generation; we had mutual respect for each other.  We got along pretty well.  In other words, we were friends at the time.

This relates to how I’m slowly coming to view family in general.  Here’s the other thing I talked about in therapy–the things my father said to me during his last visit.  Bear with me as I rehash.  The first was his comment that I was not a woman because I didn’t fit his preconceived notion about how a woman should be.  The second was, well, this one I haven’t discussed yet.  As we sat in the car, I struggled to tell him how I felt about my childhood.  I wasn’t very smooth or articulate about it, but I really tried to be honest.  When I was done, he said, “So, I shouldn’t worry about you at all?  I should just live my life in Taiwan and not think about you at all?”  The third was the last thing he said while he was here, “Why should I care about you?”

Here’s the thing.  As much as those statements/questions hurt at the time (and believe me, they hurt a hell of a lot), it was actually a relief to hear them because they were the underlying principle of the family dynamics all my fucking life.  You see, in my family, love was bartered.  You didn’t get to be loved just because you existed.  Oh, no.  You had to give something in return.  Take my father asking me about my feelings for the family and the house.   He kept demanding that I love the house (and the family)–which would mean by extension that I loved him.  Hell, I didn’t even have to mean it if I could simply say the words he wanted to hear.

Once I realized that, I could also see that my father believed he was loved based on what he could provide.  So, the fact that I didn’t love the family or the house or whatever he gave me meant I didn’t love him.  That led me to muse more about him and his joyless life.  Yes, he has fame (in Taiwan), power, and money.  He is a well-known and respected man in Taiwan.  He is an economic advisor to the vice president (whom he knew personally before the man became VP).  That’s not small potatoes, by any mean, but think about what that is in comparison to being loved for who you are?

My therapist said that my father’s calling me demonstrated that he is trying to do something different.  It’s feeble and vague because he can barely fathom that there’s something other than what he’s done and known all his life.   She commented that he had something missing inside him, and he doesn’t even know it.  It’s true.  There is a component absent from him that makes us human.  I am not exactly sure what it is, but it’s sad.

I look at him and his joyless life, and I feel that stirring of sympathy again.  I think about my lost fifteen years which were really my dead years as well.  I felt very little joy during those years as I sealed myself up in a hermetic vacuum to try to avoid the crushing pain.

As I am now remembering, if i don’t feel the pain, the sorrow, and the grief, I cannot feel the love, the joy, the peace, and the happiness, either.  It’s a package deal.  I feel it all, or I feel nothing.

In the past few months, I have realized that I don’t want to be dead inside any more.  The shit I’m working on is painful and I’m in mourning and sometimes, the pain makes me want to die.  However, there are also moments of pure joy that make me want to weep because of the sheer beauty I am experiencing.  I have a cadre of fierce friends who will defend me to the death–even from myself if need be.  I have a brother who I trust implicitly to be there if I need him.  I have two cats who bring me more joy than I ever thought possible.  I have my talents that have sustained me even through the toughest times.  I have love.  I have pleasure.  I have joy.  I have moments of peace.  None of this would have happened if I didn’t start dismantling the family mythos bit by bit.

I won’t lie to you.  It’s not easy.  There are times when I think the grief is going to break me.  This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my life.  And yet, I really have no choice.  I refuse to go back to the walking-dead state I existed in for so long.  Right now, I choose life.  That’s enough for now.

When I walked into my session, I was heavy with grief.  I have written about it before, but it’s lingering.  I have never had someone close to me die.  I have never felt this kind of grief before.  I am not sure what to do about it.  My body is heavy, physically.  I am having a hard time keeping my eyes open, even when I’ve had relatively enough sleep.  I have been crying on and off and at the silliest things.  My emotions are battered, and my spirit is frayed.

As I was recounting my feelings to my therapist, my voice was low and a bit deadened.  I have numbed out somewhat in order to take the edge off the pain.  She asked me where the grief was and what form did it take.  I said it was raw, pulsing, and almost a sentient being, and it was residing here.  I tapped myself on my chest where my heart is.  And, I immediately teared up.

In the days when I was depressed, I prided myself on not crying.  I hated to be seen crying in public, and I tried not to cry even when I was in private.  Now, I can’t seem to stop myself from crying–and I am deeply ashamed every time I do it in the presence of someone else.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a trusted friend; it still feels shameful to me.

I see it as a weakness.  I hate being weak.  Correction:  I hate looking weak.  And, many of the things I excoriate myself over fall into that category.

In the session, I was saying how I know that I could not keep living the way I had been (using the term living very loosely) and that the changes I have made were not conscious choices–I just could not do the same old shit any more.  I know that the changes in my family are a good thing, but it’s so fucking hard.  She pointed out that I am dismantling the whole fabric of my family’s dysfunction.  When I refuse to do the same old, same old, I am demanding that my family change with me.

And, it forces me to acknowledge that the illusion of my family was just that–a sham.  We looked like the perfect family.  Immigrant parents who came to the States (Tennessee, of all places!) for grad school.  They met and fell in love there before moving to Minnesota so my father could earn his PhD in economics at the U of M.  Both he and my mother worked full-time while raising my brother and me.  Rather, my father did school and work while my mother did work, took care of the home, and raised the children.   We went to church every Sunday, and we steadily climbed the American economic ladder.  We were living the American dream, damn it!  Look at how shiny we were!

As anyone who’s read my blog knows, this mask hid a mass of dysfunctions that run deep.  My father was never home–whether it was work, school, or his affairs.   When he was home, he was usually pissed off about something, and we had to tiptoe around his rage.  He was the despot of his little domain, and the rest of us were just serfs.

My mother was seriously depressed and would tell me all her marital problems when I was eleven.  And, yes, I begged her often to just leave my father.

All of this is ancient history.  My therapist asked if I’ve ever talked to my bro about it, and I haven’t.  By a mutual unspoken agreement, we don’t talk about the past.  We don’t even say, “Hey, remember when we did this?  Wasn’t that fun?”  My brother will let slip with a memory now and then, but that’s it.  A part of me is afraid to talk to him because I’m unsure I want to hear what he remembers.  On the other hand, I am profoundly aware that my brother and I have a relationship which I’ll never be able to duplicate with anyone else.  He and I share a perspective and a shared history.  As my therapist said, he’s the only other person who knows what it was like to grow up in that house.

Interestingly, my father, my brother, and I had dinner while my father was here.  My brother was talking about his FIL who is dying.  His FIL is not a pleasant person at all.  My brother said about his FIL, “My wife was afraid of him her entire childhood; she can’t understand why her mother stays with him; no one will care when he dies.”  My brother’s voice got heated, which is unlike him.  I was watching the exchange, and I realized that he could have been talking about my father.  Hell, I think he was talking about my father, even if he (my brother) didn’t consciously realize it.  My brother also said about his FIL that he (FIL) didn’t enjoy life.  This also holds true for my father.

My father travels around the world as part of his job.  He has been to France, Italy, England, Hawaii (no, he didn’t see Obama’s long-form birth certificate), Mexico, Canada (he went to Montreal after visiting here), Brazil, Japan, Hong Kong, China, Thailand, and a bunch of other countries.  He gets fed the best food in each country, and he doesn’t enjoy any of it.  He doesn’t like food at all. Even the affairs he had were more about validating his worth as a man than anything else because he certainly does not like women.

Anyway, I was talking in therapy about how I really wanted to find that grace to give to him, and I was really beating myself up because I couldn’t.  I said I knew he was really trying, and why couldn’t I give something back in return?  An interesting aside:  I initially said I appreciated that he was really trying and quickly amended it to acknowledged.  My therapist said, “Appreciate from the root____”–I can’t remember the Latin.  I said, “Which is similar to apprehend.”

Anyway, my therapist said something that really struck me.  When I was talking about my guilt at not being able to give my father that grace, she said that maybe he needs to sit with the uncomfortable feeling right now.  My urge to rush in and make things better would be counterproductive because it would return us to the past patterns.  It would be me saying, “Everything is fine.  We’re OK.  Nothing to see here–move on.”  In other words, I would be re-erecting the very illusions I’ve been dismantling.

And, there’s a part of me that wants to just that.  I know it’s fucked up.  I told my therapist that I know all this shit I’m doing now (dismantling the family) is a good thing, but it’s so fucking hard, and I’m grieving so fucking much.  She pointed out that in dismantling the family, I am ripping apart the very fabric that has held us together for the past thirty years.  Yes, it’s dysfunctional and toxic and all that shit, but it’s still what we all agreed to uphold as the way our family operated.  So, now that I am dismantling, I’m leaving us with absolutely nothing.  There is nothing behind the curtain–which means starting at ground zero.

I pointed out to my therapist that with my father, it’s actually starting from a negative because not only do I have no relationship with him, I don’t trust him.  I assume he is negotiating in bad faith, which makes everything he say suspect.  He is making steps, yes, but he has a long way to go before I even consider us on neutral territory.

Now, take the same concept (dismantling the family) and apply it to me.  At the same time I’m ripping apart my faux family, I am also dismantling the persona I have so carefully constructed over the past thirty years.  Choolie said that it was a persona forced onto me by my family, which is true to a certain extent.  The basic tenets of the personality were made by my family, certainly.   However, much of my persona was crafted by me as a defense to the unbearable heaviness of being.

My OCD traits really emerged as a way of having some illusion of control when I knew I had none.  My rigidness in the matter of scheduling events was for the same reason.  I started self-harming as a compromise for not killing myself.  Even my deep depression was a way to hold the demons at bay for awhile while I regenerated.  My determination not to commit to life, keeping death in my back pocket, as it were, was also a way to make it through each day.  As long as I had the choice to kill myself, I wouldn’t do it right at that moment.  In the same vein, my belief that what was over on the other side was worse than life was also kept me alive.

The thing is, as dysfunctional as all these behaviors were, they fucking kept me alive.  I have no doubt I would be dead without them.  However, they are no longer useful to me, so I have to let them go with my thanks.  In doing so, I am letting go of many elements I considered fundamental to my persona.  And, it’s fucking hard.

My favorite Tarot card has always been the Tower.  It represents the extremes of my nature and how I am drawn to said extremes.  I found comfort in the idea of the Tower back during my lost years.  It’s not so easy actually living it, though.

I know it’s also a good thing, a healthy thing, that I am letting go of many of my outmoded personality traits.  It scares me, though, because I’m not sure what is under all that persona.  If what I believed to be true about myself for so many years can be gone just like that–then what really is true about me?  The persona I created was part lie, part self-defense mechanism, part wishful thinking, and mostly dysfunctional functioning.  I am healthier now than I have ever been, but that’s relative.  How do I know that the new persona I’m creating isn’t just as fucked up?

I will say that the one reason I can believe the new me is better is because it’s more organic than the last one.  With both my mom’s visit and my father’s, I simply could not act in the same way.  I didn’t deliberately say, “I’m not going to follow the old patterns of interaction”–I just physically and mentally couldn’t do it any longer.  The change inside has already started, though it’s not so easy for me to see.

And, now that I am unfrozen, the part of me that wants to kill myself is unfrozen as well.  When I was depressed, I didn’t have the energy.  Now I am fucking exhausted, but I still feel things and can do things I haven’t done before.  There is a small voice in my head that tells me that all this hard work is not worth it, that my new life isn’t worth it, that once again, I am not worth it. The dark part of me that craves oblivion is not as strong as it once was, but it’s not going out without a fight, either.  The urge to self-destruct overwhelms me at times.  Then, I slip back into self-harming, which is not good, but it’s better than self-destructing.

I told my therapist about my self-harming.  I said that I am dealing with it by using that dreadful cliche, one day at a time.  And, when things get too hard, one hour or one minute at a time.  She said it’s not dreadful because the actual ‘one day at a time’ thing is sound thinking.  It’s making the decision to stay present in each moment without getting too far ahead of myself.  Take the case of binging and purging.  Usually, when the feeling hits, I make the choice to binge.  Then, a haze takes over me.  I binge, I purge, I cry, I wash my hands, I’m done.  It’s very ritualistic, and it feels like each step is inevitable.  But, as I teased out in therapy, I can stop anywhere along the road.  Even if I binge, I can not purge.  I know that sounds ridiculously simple, but it never occurred to me before.  After a binge, I can think, “OK.  That was bad.  I don’t have to make it worse by purging.”

Again, this sounds trite, but it’s all about making conscious decisions every step of the way.  It’s actually the way I operate in general.  I have to talk myself into doing each step of something I dread while giving myself the option of backing out after each step.  When I talked about this earlier with my therapist, she said it’s actually about making the deliberate choice to do each step.  She’s right.

I tend to trip myself up by projecting into the future.  I say, “If I do this, then I have to do this, and then and then and then.”  For example, “If I volunteer for the Dayton campaign, I have to stick it out until the election.”  Um, no.  I can go once and then decide it’s not for me.  Again, I know this sounds very basic, but it’s not something I’d ever really thought before.

In addition, I’m feeling very defensive because I’m so raw.  Everything hurts, and I feel like I’m a big-assed burden on everyone.  When I get like this, my impulse is to withdraw from my loved ones so I don’t spread my toxicity to them.  Even though I have been assured that I am not a burden–it doesn’t make me feel like any less of one.  And, I am in that place where I question everything I do/say because I worry that it stems from a place of dysfunction.  Since I am in the transition between carefully-crafted dysfunctional functioning persona and something more raw and real, I am afraid that everything I say and do is wrong.

Forgive the even more than usual disjointed rambling.  It’s late/early; I’m exhausted; I am grieving.

The night I went to get him, he arrived around 11:30.  We got home after midnight.  We chatted some, and then I went to my computer room to hop online.  I had the door mostly closed (but not all the way so the kittehs could come in if they wanted), and I was startled the fuck out when he entered without knocking.  He said I didn’t have any food.  I said I did.  He said there was no milk or bread.  I said I don’t drink milk any more because of my dairy allergies, and I did have bread–it just wasn’t made of wheat.  He half-laughed and repeated that I didn’t have any food.  I repeated that I did.  I had just gone shopping that day and had plenty of food.  He left.

During the night, I heard him get up around two, go to the kitchen, rattle around the fridge, and then return to bed.  When I went to bed at 4:30 a.m., the light was still on in his room.

The next morning, I got up around 8 a.m.  He told me he had only two hours of sleep because he’d been so hungry.  I said that was too bad.  He had an  appointment in the morning and came back for lunch.  Then he started in on me about something, but fortunately, my brother dropped by.  My brother is seen as an adult because he’s married, and, quite frankly, because he’s a man.  Even when my father is lecturing my brother, he (my father) doesn’t demean him (my brother).  Oh, and my father asked my brother to fix a closet door.  My brother said, “You didn’t try to fix it yourself, did you?”  He and I exchanged conspiring eyerolls and grins because my father is horrible at fixing things.  He also has a magnetic field that kills all electrical things, but that’s another story.  It was nice to have that moment with my brother to lighten the mood.

Then, after my brother left, my father took a nap because he was ‘so tired after only getting two hours of sleep because he was so hungry’ before going to his afternoon appointment.  Then, we went to my bro’s house and to the Olive Garden for dinner.  Wouldn’t be my choice, but the kids aren’t very adventurous in their eating–nor is my SIL, actually.  Or my father.

My father mentioned once more that he only got two hours of sleep because he was so hungry.  Again, I didn’t say anything.

So, after we return home, my father asks me, “Why didn’t you prepare for my trip?  Was it because you didn’t have the money?”  I asked what he meant, and he said, “You didn’t have food in the fridge.”  I repeated that I had.  He said, “You didn’t have milk or bread or kiwis.”  I said, “I have bread.  I looked for kiwis, but they didn’t have any.”  He said, “They did.  I got them at Cub.”  I said, “I shop at a coop, and they didn’t have any.”  He was pouting, and I added, “You could have emailed me ahead of time to tell me what you needed.  You could have asked me to run to Cub and get you something.  You could have gone yourself.”  Cub is open 24/7, and it’s less than a mile from us.  My father:  ”I didn’t have to ask you before.”  Me (desperately trying not to lose my temper and failing):  ”You are a big boy.  You can ask for what you need.  I am not a mind-reader.

Later, as I thought about it, I realized that, yes, I did have milk in the house before, but that was because I used to drink milk.  Once I shed it from my diet, I didn’t buy it any more.  Same with bread.  I used to eat wheat bread, so I would buy it.  The only thing I ever specifically bought for him before a visit were kiwis, and I did look for those at the coop.

The other thing I realized is that my mom does all the grocery shopping in Taiwan.  All of it.  She does all the housework, too.  My father’s secretary does all the chores at the office (including printing out his emails so he can read them), so he’s used to women catering to his every need.  It was what he expected from me when I was a kid, and it’s still what he expects from me now.  Oh, and he couldn’t believe I didn’t have any oatmeal in the house.  Again, I don’t eat it, so I don’t buy it.

That was the first big conflict.  The second is a running family issue.  My father can’t deal with the cold.  And, since he can’t stand the cold, he can’t imagine that anyone else can.  So, on the day it was seventy degrees out, he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and a light jacket.  I, on the other hand, was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and light-fabric pants.  He took one look at me and said I had to put on something else because it was too cold for what I was wearing.  I said it wasn’t too cold, and I had a jacket in the trunk of the car.  That was my concession as I drive with the windows down when it’s zero degrees out.  He told me that I could not go outside like that, and I was this close to saying, “Fucking watch me.”  I didn’t, though.  I simply went to the car, and he dropped the subject.

To add insult to injury, my bro was only wearing a short-sleeved shirt as well, and nada from my father.  Middle nephew was wearing a t-shirt.  Nothing.  Niece was wearing a sleeveless shirt, and he asked her if she should wear more than that.

He has done this since I was a child.  Back then, he used to say, “I’m cold–put on a sweater.”  He cannot comprehend how someone else could feel something different.  And, as my faithful readers know, I love the cold.  Anything over seventy is not comfortable to me.   Sixty is bearable, and under fifty is nice.  I prefer sub-zero temps.  I do not need a fucking jacket when it’s seventy degrees outside.  The only reason I didn’t wear shorts is because I knew we’d be going out to dinner.

The third irritant that stuck out in my mind was actually funny only because it was so fucking stupid.  He had an appointment Friday morning.  When he came home, he had a gift in his hand.  He gave it to me and told me to open it.  I looked at him strangely because he doesn’t give gift-wrapped presents.  He said it was from his appointment.  I asked why I should open it as I started opening it.  He said, “Because women like those kind of things.”  I said, “What kind of things?”  I wasn’t being a contrarian–I really didn’t know what he meant.  He said, “Women like this kind of thing.  I always bring the gifts I get in Taiwan home to Mom and let her open them.”  I was starting to get an inkling of what he meant, but I simply repeated, “What kind of things?”  He said, “You know.  Women like to receive flowers.”  I said, “I don’t.”  He said, “Women cry when they hear about a wedding.”  I said, “I don’t.”  He said, “Women cry when they hear about a baby being born.”  I said, “I don’t.”  He half-smiled and said, “Well, you’re not a woman.”  I finished opening the gift and said, “No, you just have a very narrow idea of what a woman should be like.”

Again, he was half-joking, but not really.  He has no clue what to do with a daughter who doesn’t wear makeup or make an effort to dress up all the time and who doesn’t care about gifts and holidays and whatever.  In the past, he gave me a French doll when I was twelve and was upset when I wasn’t thrilled (I never played with dolls except to cut off their hair and make them have sex).  My father went to a castle/hotel when he was in Banff, Canada, and afterwards, he had to tell me all about it.  He said, “They do weddings there.  I will pay for it if you want to have your wedding there.”  I just looked at him as if he were crazy.

However, the advice he gave to me when I was a teenager before I had my first boyfriend in how to attract a boyfriend pretty much encapsulates his entire thinking on the gender thing:  Let a boy help you with something like fixing your car.  Let the boy beat you in sports.  Raise your voice a few octaves.

That’s it.  That was the sum total of what I should do to get a boyfriend.  I looked at him and said, “If that’s what it takes to get a boyfriend, then I don’t want one.”

So, Sunday comes.  I am relieved because he’s leaving that day.  I am in the computer room surfing when he comes in.  He says, “Minna, could you come here a second?  I want to show you something.”

Now, I will say that my answer was snotty and terse because I don’t trust him.  To me, he does this shit to make me jump.  So, I said sharply, “What is it?”  He said, “It’ll just take a minute.  Let me show you.”  I said, “No, tell me.”  When he did, it was about the loose toilet and how he fixed it.  I said I didn’t need to see that, and he left.

Again, I admit that I was snotty and rude to him.  It’s partly because I had tried so hard all weekend not to go off on him (and not succeeding) and partly because of the mistrust I have for him.  I am not willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.  In addition, he did not say one nice thing to me during the whole visit, but only found fault.  That is the way our family operates, but it’s wearying, regardless.

Anyway, in the car (he drove), he was silent.  I asked if he talked to Mom, and he said, “Yes.”  I asked how she was, and he said, “Fine.”  I shrugged and tried to relax.  About halfway to the airport, it occurred to me that my father was upset with me and that I was supposed to ask why.  This is the pattern.  He gets upset, gives the silent treatment, and is cajoled out of his mood.  Or, he yells.  However, I think he knew that if he yelled at me this time, I would yell right back (and I would have) so he went for the silent treatment.

Honestly?  I didn’t give a fuck.  I was happy, actually, because it meant that I didn’t have to talk to him.  As we pulled into the airport, he made as if to park in the parking lot.  I said I would just drop him off.  Then, to my horror, he started crying.  Crying.  I have never seen my father cry.  Ever.  As we pull up to the drop-off area of the airport, he asked in a choked voice, “Why are you treating me this way?”  I slammed down emotionally, but I managed to ask, “What way?”  He said, “You are treating me so unkindly.  Are we enemies?”  He pulled out his handkerchief with a trembling hand and pressed it to his eyes.  And, even though I didn’t say it to him, my automatic thought was, “No, we are not enemies.  I don’t respect you enough to make you my enemy.”

Now, I have to break off here to do something out of the norm for me.  I am not going to recount the rest of the confrontation at the airport because it’s too raw for me right now.  I may write about it at some point, but I cannot just now.

Suffice to say, by the time I pulled out of the airport, I was reeling.  I had been gut-punched, and for five minutes, it was a toss-up whether I would crash the car or not.  On purpose, I mean.  I felt like a complete shit as I drove.  My emotions were totally out-of-kilter, and I was trembling as I drove.  I made it home in one piece, hurt myself, and then freaked out some more.  Finally, I sent out emails to five friends.  Each of them responded in his/her own way, which was exactly what I needed from that person.

Kel was sympathetic and tough.  She called him a shithead and warned me not to let him get what he wants (my emotional destruction).  She emailed with me throughout the day to keep me grounded.  She talked about her day and joked with me.  Humor always helps me.  Choolie was sympathetic and really had my back.  She knows how crazy you can feel when you’re around someone who sees the world in a totally warped way.  She reminded me that he was the one in bizarro world (with the help of my mother), not me.  I’m a freak–I’m not crazy.  Gregory was also firm with me in that he won’t let me bullshit myself.  In addition, he has a positive outlook that allows him to see a good outcome, but not in a Pollyanna sort of way.  He reminded me that it was over and that my father had to resort to those tactics because he had been losing the fight, as it were.  Kiki listened sympathetically and gently reminded me that I was giving my father an awful lot of power.  She gave him a slightly more sympathetic portrayal while validating that he had been shitty toward me.  She told me to call her the next night if I needed her.  Natasha had some pity toward my father while reminding me that I didn’t have to have any pity toward him whatsoever.  She emphasized that his issues were not my problem.  She asked what I was going to do about minimizing his effect on me, and when were we doing lunch?

From all five, I got love and unwavering support.  They are unequivocally in my corner and not shy about expressing their loyalty to me.  Thank you all for being there for me.  I love each of you very much.

In addition, Alex S., Fawn, and Dan emailed me asking me how the visit went and ee wished me luck in a thread over at BJ.  It touches me to know that people are thinking of me and wishing me well.

And, there are other people in my life I could have called upon if need be–including my brother.  What I’ve realized from this trip is that my brother is on my side, no matter that we have nothing in common.

The addendum to this is that my father called me today.  Apparently, the phone has been off the hook for the past few days (not on purpose.  It’s just an old phone and hard to hang up properly).  I finally discovered it was off the hook and put it back on.  I was expecting my brother to call me so when the phone rang, I answered it.  I normally don’t, and I wish I hadn’t.  It was my father.  Apparently, he had been trying to reach me for the last few days.  He even called my brother and made my brother call me (of course, my bro couldn’t get through, either).  Anyway, my father was in Montreal for a conference.  He asked if I would like to go to Montreal, and he said he wished I were with him.  He said the hotel was right in Chinatown, and he knew I would love that.  He asked what my favorite foods were, and right before he hung up the phone, he said with a catch in his voice, “I love you very much.”  I couldn’t say it back to him–I just couldn’t, so I said, “You, too.”  Which is a lie.  Then, I hung up the phone and freaked the fuck out.

You see, what I wanted from the trip was to show him a modicum of grace–not for him, but for me.  I cannot carry this pain, rage, bitterness, sorrow, and anger around with me any longer.  The only way I can get rid of it is by letting go of it.  Again, it’s not for his sake, but for mine.

On the phone today, he was trying–he really was.  And, I couldn’t give him anything because it just hurt too fucking much.  I couldn’t give him a scrap or a crumb or anything, and I know it hurt him.  Despite it all, I do not want to hurt him.  But, I cannot give him what he wants, and it broke me.  It hurt so much that I just cried for fifteen minutes straight.  I tried not to hurt myself (yes, it’s a compulsion bordering on addiction), and I held out for as long as I could.  I gave in, and it numbed me out enough to function.  Barely.  I talked with Gregory and Julie tonight (via the internets), and they were able to talk me down somewhat.

Still.  I sit here typing this, and my heart hurts.  It aches.  I don’t want to be like this, and I am afraid that I am running out of time.  Not just for me, but for my father.  After his visit, I felt that being around him was toxic and that I had to cut all ties.  Then, after the heart-wrenching phone call this afternoon, I felt an overwhelming amount of grief because I couldn’t give him anything at all.  He’s trying, really trying, and all I can think is, “Not now.  I can’t give to you now.”

I feel as if I’m ripping apart the family only to discover that there is nothing there.  I mean, there are relationships within the family, of course, but the idea of the Hong family is sheer illusion, and I’m the one doing the destroying.

At any rate, I was still in a funk over my father when when I went downstairs to nap.  I had just read Kel’s offer to house me, and I was thinking about that.  I knew I couldn’t do that (for many reasons), and I was despairing over what to do as an alternative.  With those unhappy thoughts in my head, I fell asleep.

When I awoke, I was violently ill (dry heaves) for a few minutes, and then I was determined to fight.  I thought of my boys and how I couldn’t leave them alone with my father.  He wouldn’t do anything to them, but he does not like animals.  He tolerates mine because they are mine, but he is not fond of them–though he does say they are not bothersome in any way.  High praise, indeed.

I do not want to move them or board them because this is their home, too, damn it.  Besides their foster home, this is the only home they’ve known.  They don’t take too well to change, and I will not move them.

In addition, I’m tired of flight.  I have done flight all my life, and while it was useful and necessary in the past, I cannot do it any longer.  I don’t know why it especially sticks in my craw this time, but it does.   I think it is because I’m just starting to live again, and damn it, I am not going out like that.  Seriously.  I lived through the shit he did to me when I was a kid.  I can fucking live through this, too.  And, to be honest, I am tired of giving him so much power.  Yes, he fucked up my childhood.  There is nothing I can do about that.  If I could I would go back and change it and never had to have experienced that.  However, it’s not gonna happen, so there’s no point in dwelling on that.

The only thing I can do now is work on how much power he has over me in the present.   I am in the process of untangling from my parents financially (to some extent), and my mother and I have worked hard to cobble out a workable working relationship.  By the way, I have to remember that I thought there was no chance my mother would change at all before she came for her two-month stay.  I thought that discussions of my childhood would be more than she could handle.  I was wrong on both accounts.

This is not to say that I think my father will change; I don’t.  Back to my mom for a minute.  Yes, she changed, but so did I.  Or rather, I changed in my interaction with her.  I started acting more like an adult with her, and in response, she treated me more like an adult.  True, I was discouraged at the end because our personal relationship had only gotten a little bit better instead of an appreciable amount better, but as I was reminded by several people, what did change was amazing.  And lots of work.  As my therapist pointed out, in the first week my mom was here, I was saying I couldn’t fucking say anything to my mom about my father.  By the time my mother left, we had hashed out some of my issues from childhood that included my father.

No, not that one.  My therapist asked how I felt about talking to my mother about the…damn it.  I hate saying/typing it, so I will use the least ugly word possible, abuse of me by my father.  She asked if I felt I needed to talk about it with my mother in order to have a relationship with her (my mom).  Much to my surprise, I said no.  I realized that my mother and I could have a real relationship, albeit a limited one, without me bringing up the abuse.  You know what?  I was fine with that.

Back to my father.  I don’t think he’ll change, and there’s nothing I can do to change him.  My mom claims he has mellowed with the years, and I do have to say that he called her while she was here to tell her about a change in his plans so she wouldn’t worry (he never would have done that when I was a kid.  In fact, he would have screamed at her for daring to ask about it).  So, he does care about her on some level.   And, she has chosen to remain with him, so I can let go of my need to protect her.  Yes, I know it’s fucked up, but that is what she taught me when I was younger; I was responsible for her emotional well-being.

Now that I see she has made her pact with the devil so to speak, I can let it go. And, may I say, she never protected me when I was a kid, either.  So, any guilt I may have at not being vigilant about her emotional well-being is wiped out by the knowledge that she has consistently chosen my father over me.

Back to my interaction with my father.  First of all, I don’t want a relationship with him, so any idea of pleasing/mollifying/catering to him can be thrown out the window.  Second, and I have to keep emphasizing this, he can no longer hurt me.  I am not that little girl any longer.  I am not seven years old (though I sometimes feel that way), and I can use chin na techniques on him if need be.

I tend to slip into the victim’s role fairly easily.  Now, while that’s understandable given what I’ve gone through, it’s not especially helpful in this situation.  Victim implies not being able to control the situation and having things done to me.  It was how I felt in Taiwan, and it nearly killed me.  My therapist rightly pointed out after I returned that after my initial attempt at setting my boundaries and speaking up for myself (and being ignored), I folded.  I didn’t try again, and I just did my best to survive the experience.

That’s the dastardly part of feeling I have no control–I cede whatever little control I do have and then basically reinforce my perceptions.  I have mentioned before how I can see the stupidity when my mom shoots down every solution to a problem, and yet, I find myself doing the same thing time after time.  It’s the same here.  I construct a box that is very tight-fighting, but that is mostly of my own imagination, and then I refuse to get out of it.

In Taiwan, I could have said, “I don’t want to go” and meant it.  I could have said, “I do not want to do this activity” and stuck to it.  I did not because I let my feelings of helplessness overtake me, and I retreated into my shell.  This has been my default response for all my life.  Again, given my childhood, it’s understandable.  However, it is not useful now (if it ever was).  And, after awhile, it became a reason not to do anything.  It’s horrible to feel you have no power, but it’s also a way to avoid any responsibility or to take any action.  After all, if I cannot affect a situation, why do anything at all?

I was ready to fall back into myself about my father’s visit.  I might still do it–who knows?  The demons were sure poised to push me back into the abyss (as they always are).  I still have some residual self-negativity left from the visit from my mom.  I mean, this would have been the perfect opportunity for me to just collapse and return to Minna 1.0.  For those who read the entry previous to this one, you know I was on the edge.

However, something inside me said, “No.  Just–no.”  It was a small voice and it came from some deep recess of my brain, but it was very firm.  That little voice stopped the panic that was infiltrating my mind with the repeated insistence of, “No.”  No. You are not going to fold back into yourself and lose the progress you’ve gained in the last year.  No.  You are not going to numb out and become a walking zombie again.  No.  You are not going to allow that man to victimize you again.

Me:  What?  WTF?  I have to self-destruct–

Voice:  No.

Me:  I have to come apart–

Voice:  No.

Me:  I can’t do this!  I’m too weak!

Voice:  No.

This is the first time I’ve heard this particular voice in my head.  She is quiet, but firm.  She is no-nonsense, cutting through the bullshit, but she is not mean.  She just states what she sees as the truth with conviction.  She is unfamiliar, but she is a welcome addition to the cacophony in my brain.

And, I need someone in my head who is on my side.  I mean, I have the damn demons telling me what a piece of shit I am.  I have my superego telling me that I should feel guilty because of this and that and the other thing.   I have the scared, damaged little girl who is afraid of everything.  I have the bitch who, well, just bitches about everything.  There are more, but those are the main ones.  This new voice is a refreshing change.  She isn’t noisy like the others, and she doesn’t demand my attention.  However, I can’t help but hear her through the chatter.

No.  I am not going out like that.

I have been a victim.  I held on for many years after (15, but who’s counting?).  Some would say that I am a surviver, but that implies a more active participation in said survival than I feel I have done.  I endured.  I numbed out, hunkered down, covered my head, and tried not to get hit by the shrapnel.  I existed, yes, but survived?  Eh.  Not so much.

Despite my current set-backs and plunges into the darkness, I am in a better place than I have ever been.  Let me rephrase that.  I am in a place to potentially propel me to the best place I’ve ever been.  I would say that in some ways, I was in a slightly better place a year ago, but that was before the flashbacks hit me full-force.  So, in the light of that, it’s not surprising that I’ve regressed a bit.

Here’s the thing.  I have always been more comfortable with my weaknesses and flaws than with my strengths and assets.  I think it’s good to know one’s negative side, but not at the expense of embracing one’s positive side.  And, over time, I have warped my weaknesses into my strengths in a way.  I mean, I know they are weaknesses, but I tout them as if they were strengths, even if I decry them as weaknesses.  It’s like I said about victimization.  If I think I am too weak to do X, Y, or Z, then I don’t have to do X, Y, or Z.  It’s twisted and backwards, but it’s how I’ve operated for far too long.

It gives me a way out.  It allows me to do what I’ve always done and not do anything differently.  Of course, the results are the same, which is something I do not want.  I do not want to keep feeling like shit.  I do not want to keep giving my father power over me.  I do not want to allow the damage he’s done to me to break  me even more.

Strengths were verboten in my family.  It was unseemly to be proud of something.  I learned that lesson well, too.  However, it has gotten me jackshit to focus on my weaknesses while sacrificing my strengths.  In addition, some of the things that are flaws in some circumstances (such as my OCD) can be strengths in others.  It’s a flaw to be obsessive about stupid shit (like my insane need to control everything trivial), but it’s a strength to finish something once I put my mind to it.

So.  Here’s the thing.  I am not going to self-harm while my father is here.  I am saying that now because I need to see it in writing.  I have a habit of hedging on these things–keeping the option in my back pocket, as it were.  In the past, it’s saved my life to give myself that out, but now, it’s no longer useful.

I am stronger than I was five years ago or two years ago.  I am even stronger than I was while I was in Taiwan.  My therapist said that while the experience in Taiwan was horrible for me, it did bring things to the forefront that needed to be dealt with.  It’s true.  The trip to Taiwan was the catalyst for my mother sending me the letter telling me what was wrong with me and my inner realization that things had to change.

I need to let go of my habit of seeing the worst of me and using it as a reason not to do things differently.  Despite my focus on the worst of me, I can see a few of my strengths as well.  I am stubborn.  I question authority.  I have a twisted sense of humor.  I fight for the underdog.  I can use these things in my defense when needed.

In addition, I have good friends locally and around the country–indeed, the world, who would be more than happy to lend me a hand, a shoulder, or an ear (or a house, thanks, Kel) if I need it.  I don’t have to do this on my own–which is in itself an odd thing as I have long since tried to keep my burdens to myself.

Look, my father is going to be who he is.  A narcissistic, unfeeling, domineering, empty, charming cipher.  That’s who he is.  There isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.  However, I can change how I react to him–that is within my control.  I don’t have to let him make me feel useless, worthless, broken, and damaged.  It’s not going to be easy, but it’s also gonna be in my home country rather than his this time.  I don’t have to let him walk all over me.

Feelings, as strong as they are, are just feelings.  I have to try to remember this when I get overwhelmed with negativity, as I know I will when my father returns.  I am no Pollyanna, and I have no illusions that just because I made this breakthrough, I am not going to slide back while he’s here.  I will.  How I deal with it, though, is what matters.

I have my therapy session tomorrow.  I am going to bring this up, and I am going to formulate a plan as to how to deal with the imminent visit.  I said awhile ago that if I go down, it’s not going to be without a fight.  It’s time to back up those words with action.

P.S.  The first vid is because I have always liked Pat Benatar’s in-your-face attitude.  The second vid is from a good friend who declared it my real personal anthem (instead of Hurt by NIN/The Man in Black).  I didn’t believe him at the time, and I still don’t quite believe him now, but I am trying.  The third vid is because I love the Femmes, and this song is the attitude I am feeling right now.