Muchness and Light

I'll love you in your dreams, but please don't try to hold me in your arms.

It's something of an understatement to say that I am an open book.

Everything about me, all of the stories that led me to be who I am now, have been laid bare in the pages of Persona Non Grata and on these blog posts at Muchness and Light.  There may be a few other outlets—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—that show snippets of my personality, but generally everything about my past is on public display.

When I meet people for the first time, especially men, I tend to throw all of that out there at once. 

"Hi, I'm Stephanie.  I'm a lot to handle.  You will one day say it's too much and that I overwhelm you.  They all do, and I have no reason to think you're any different.  Here I am—take it or leave it!" 

It's kind of like lobbing a grenade of muchness at them and daring them to take me on. 

For all of my talk of loathing the unavailable men whom I perpetually attract, is it really I who is unavailable?

I hate it when men I care about tell me I'm too much.  It strikes a nerve in me, both because it's true and because I warned them.  Just once, I'd like not to feel that pang of I told you so that inevitably comes.

But just because I warn someone of what to expect, and how to deal with me when it happens, does that make it okay?  Does my glittery Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here sign justify my reaction when they give up hope?

If I taunt men into letting me down, I am culpable, both in giving them reason to turn away and in delighting in being able to find those reasons when it happens.  I get a little jolt from pushing their buttons, and I probably try to do it from the onset of salutation.  It's like an experiment sometimes, just to see how much it will take before their façade of availability cracks and they scurry to close the gaps before I can get my hooks into them and force them to open deeper and wider than they'd ever imagined.

And that is exactly what I do.

I test men, looking to see who will fail me and how and why.  Sometimes I know within minutes that they aren't up to the challenge, and I dust their crumbling egos from my fingertips as I walk away.  Sometimes it takes longer, in which case I become more subtle, more unintentionally manipulative in my ministrations.  They rarely see or feel it coming, though, as I do seem to have the inexplicable power to sweet talk them into smiling submission.  (Dimples and destruction.)

I told Hot Pocket that it's one of Sassafras's superpowers, the ability to hide behind a plume of pretty, swirling smoke until they're so entranced they can't help but stare dumbfounded at the glittery chaos that bats her eyes and nods her blond ponytail as she wishes what she wants for their world. 

(This is one of the many reasons that my TARDIS would be the I Dream of Jeannie bottle.)

My girls, the Castration Committee, are the ones who can accept my muchness for exactly what it is, no matter what.  They will sometimes call me out for being too much, but they never judge me for it and they never, ever turn away from it or from me.  I constantly experience the depths of love from the people who adore me no matter what.

Is it too much to want that same connection in erotic love?

It's unimaginable to me that it won't exist for me, that given everything I have lived and done and seen and experienced, that there isn't a lover who can adore me and accept me and embrace my batshit while they kiss me breathless.  I have paid so much, done so much work, to get to the place that I have the ability to love as deeply and intensely as I do, and to do it willingly and from a place of utter awareness and selflessness.  Can it really be true that there is no one worth that price?  Is there no reward for having worked this hard? 

Even asking those questions feels arrogant and makes me think I have so much more work to do.

But I don't want my book to end now.  I don't want my stories to end at 40.  I want someone, maybe more than one if that's how my journey goes, who will make new stories with me—bigger, better, faster, more!  I want someone who reminds me to breathe when I'm so excited that I stammer over my own head, but who also smiles patiently and happily when I tell them for the hundredth time that day just how and why I love them.  And I want that to be the same someone who can sit in the quiet with me and let me cry out whatever my heart can't find the words to express.  The same someone who can make time stand still and the seas to turn to dust with just one kiss. 

It comes back to the idea of expectations, what's reasonable and what's not.  Growler and Absolem would advise me to be willing to lower those expectations.  Maurice reminded me when I needed it most that doing that will only lead to tears.  Bounder reminded me that my expectations can be met in the most painful and unexpected of ways.  But Hot Pocket says it exists for me, that there's someone out there who can and will love me like that. 

I hope she's right.  It feels like she is, like she just has to be, but maybe that's my tragically romantic heart being unreasonably optimistic. 

And maybe, just maybe, someone else will get the chance to tell me, "I told you so."

The chains that you break to be free, well they tear up the ground when you drag them around.

Oh, my heart is a brutal, tempestuous little bitch sometimes—trapped in the delicate, fragile teapot of my head.

I'm now three years into Muchness and Light—November 25^th will be three years exactly—and this forum has been as cathartic for me as my therapist's office, though substantially cheaper.  Sometimes I find myself covering old ground again, about love and those life lessons I have tackled so openly during this time.  When I realize I'm circling back to something I thought I'd exhausted before, I realize there's a reason, something I didn't get right the first time.

There's always some catalyst—a new drama or relationship or end of a relationship—that sends my heart reeling and bouncing around the confines of my head.  My dad would likely make the "bb in a box car" analogy.  The cacophony between my ears sounds like a thousand simultaneous, murmured conversations with the bells and whistles of a pinball machine dinging above the din. 

It's overwhelming to me sometimes.  How could it not be too much for anyone else?  How could it not exhaust someone else, to let them take a shot at the flippers?

It has become part of my established, public persona that I am a lot to handle.  My online dating profile even warned men that I can be intimidating, that I'm "loud and voracious and a ball of batshit blond energy."  I've received hundreds of messages, telling me how they appreciate my honesty and that they'd like a shot at channeling that energy.  Five minutes later, when it's clear that they assume it means I just want great, casual sex, I'm generally done with that conversation. 

It's not usually that much different in person. 

When someone takes the time to get to know me, though, they do get to see my softer side.  I'm really very sweet and incredibly affectionate, and I am fully capable of being quiet and still when the moment demands it. 

As confident as I am in who I am, though, I'm also very insecure in how other people deal with me.  I can get my feelings hurt far more easily (and often) than I'd like to admit.  In fact, I often hide that from the person who has lashed me, knowing it's usually not an intentional assault against my fragile façade.  I'm a lot of personality, which means my heart is a big, easy target.  It's that much harder to miss when I've taken it off my sleeve and am just carrying it openly in my hands, like a shield made from an oversized box of Valentine's chocolates.   

I'm not entirely fearless in my pursuit of love, no matter how brave I may be.  I'm not afraid to let people get close; I'm afraid to let them stay close.  I've been out with a lot of men in the last year.  Less than half of them have gotten a second date.  Of those that have, less than a quarter have gotten yet another shot.  I tend to throw myself out there and then yank myself back from the brink.  In all fairness, it has usually been because I could readily tell those men weren't for me, and I didn't want to waste my time on those fruitless endeavors. 

When I meet someone I truly like, someone for whom I develop feelings, it's very hard for me not to assume that they will disappoint me.  I have a definite pattern of finding emotionally unavailable men and trying my best to forge a relationship with them anyway.  It goes back to my childhood (What doesn't?  Ask my therapist.), and I can pinpoint the unavailability in each and every one of the men I've been attached to romantically.  All retrospectively, of course.

In my moving-into-the-new-year post from the end of 2012, I wrote this:

I do not want unavailable men.  Maybe that seems like a no-brainer, but I have this tendency to attract such beings into my life.  Whether logistically or emotionally, I am magnetically attracted to the men who are least likely to be able to share their life or mine.  Maybe it's something about their being inherently broken—a fragile cat.  They're soft and pretty and purr when I pet them, but they can't give what I need or want in return.  I don't want that anymore. 

So why the hell do I keep going back to that?

My heart knows better in theory but not in practice.  My head knows it's stupid to even glance at a fragile cat.  But I do it all the damn time, as if one day, just maybe one of them will break that pattern and not be quite like the rest. 

Hot Pocket chided me in her drawling, gentle way that I need to get it into my pretty, thick head that I deserve to be happy with good things.  I know this logically.  I am human.  I'm a good person.  I have done nothing so unredeemable that it makes me undeserving of love. 

But in my heart, I don't know that I'm worthy of the affection and attention of a man who truly loves me.  Everything in my past has shown me the opposite is true.  The people who love me most will disappoint me and hurt me more than I ever could imagine. 

It's unfair of me to have those expectations of a new person, and it runs the risk of becoming self-fulfilling prophecy.  If I am constantly waiting for them to back away, perpetually on the edge of heartbreak, I am much more likely to flinch and flee at the slightest provocation.  It also places an unfair strain on them, to be living under my super-observant, watchful eye. 

Somewhere along the way, I have to learn to be here now, to let the present be not only what matters most but what influences most.  I've let go of most of the hurt of the past, but it's impossible for me to forget about it all.  What I can't do is expect someone who has no ties to that to live in trepidation that one of my ghosts will haunt them. 

And every time I think I've laid those ghosts to rest, when I am finally able to rest, the rattling of their dragging chains clangs through the commotion in my head and sends me caroming toward the opposite wall of the teapot, where my heart dings against the crackleware and the echoes feel like a constant death knell. 

There's a comfort in seeking out what you know, in finding respite in what's familiar.  Maybe that's why I feel snug within the confines of unavailability.  I can rail against the men who compartmentalize me, who put me in the proverbial box that I purport to loathe, but I am all too willing to climb inside, crouching down excitedly until I can burst through the top like a girl in a giant cake.  I do love the anticipation, the waiting to see how they will react when I am suddenly and dramatically exposed.
 

In reality, they almost always freak the fuck out when it happens, when I am fully and completely me.  They make that face of surprise, with a glimmer of oh-my-god-it's-just-too-much before they wipe it blank and try to hide their apprehension.  That is the pinpoint of unavailability. 

I can't and won't change who I am to make them more comfortable.  I've discussed this many, many times—it's dishonest to me and to them.  I can adjust and hold back a little bit, trying not to inundate them with my muchness, but when my heart gets invested, the floodgates will part and set the deluge upon them. 

That's when it becomes sink or swim for us both.  I keep looking for the cat who can swim, who can disentangle me from the ghostly chains and bring me back to the surface, even when I know I'm the only one who can do it.  But somewhere there just has to be someone who thinks I'm worth that battle, doesn't there?  Doesn't everyone deserve a love that will fight for them, no matter what? 

So I keep fighting like that for the men I love, even when I know they won't fight back.  Maybe I'm hoping it's kind of like karma, that if I put enough out there that I will eventually have to get back what I've given.  Like a cosmic love dowry--it takes a huge investment to get what you want. 

Until in comes, I'll keep dancing and jumping around, waving my giant, red heart and offering my delicious confections to passers-by.  Surely one of them will appreciate it, someday. 

Teach your children what you believe in.

Sometimes when I'm anxious or overwhelmed by whatever the hell Life is trying to throw at me, I start cleaning.  Right now, I'm back in a cycle of insomnia, too, sleeping for just a few hours a night before I wake to the sounds of my cacophonous head, which is constantly worrying about logistics and money and how I'm going to take care of my children and myself. 

I've been cleaning since around 5:00 this morning.  That means my head has also been churning since well before dawn.  I decided to take a break from the smell of Murphy's Oil Soap to get some of it out.

Between loads of laundry and dishes, but before I started laundering the mattress pads and sponge-cleaning the kitchen cabinets, I woke my boys and got them ready for school.  Most mornings in our house are an hour or more of what we call Rage Ballet—a frantic, complicated dance of breakfast and medicine and teeth-brushing, carefully choreographed to a loud, constant chant of, "Stop touching your brother and put your shoes on your feet!"

As much as it feels like Dagwood Bumstead's rush out the front door most mornings, I do love this time with the boys.  They're fresh in their day and often share the most exquisite moments of Little Boy Truth with me while we're driving to school or waiting at this bus stop.

This morning, my younger son, Tricky, and I were discussing his 9^th birthday, which is coming in a few days.  It's my weekend with the boys, and I want to make his birthday as special as possible for all of us.  Money, however, is incredibly tight right now.  I won't go into detail, but suffice it to say that things are getting a little desperate.  I'm feeling an incredible amount of guilt for not being able to have a birthday party with his friends or to take the boys to laser tag or to ride go-carts or whatever. 

But we were talking about going to one of his favorite restaurants on Saturday, with a gift card that my mom sent to him for his birthday.  (No, I will not expect him to pay for anyone else with his card, though he happily would.)

Tricky:  And then on Sunday, it'll be my birthday, and there will be lots of presents!

Me:  Well, I do have a really great gift for you, but it's not a whole lot.  (I'm trying to make sure he's not expecting that $400 electric scooter he really wants, though I know he will adore what I picked out for him.)

Tricky:  That's okay.  Besides, having you is the best present of all, Mama. 

I pulled up to the curb in the carpool line just then, and he opened his door.  I told him I loved him and blew him a kiss—I'm not allowed to kiss him in public where someone he knows might see it.  He gave him his sweetest smile, with the dimple to match mine, and told me he loved me.

As I drove away, I burst into tears. 

I hate not being able to give the boys everything they ask for.  I don't mean super expensive toys or impromptu trips to DisneyWorld.  I loathe telling them that I can't afford an extra pack of gummy bears today or to take them to see the new Thor movie when it's still in the full-price theater. 

Through this entire process of divorce, I have fought to keep them grounded and healthy, to edify all of the lessons I'd been trying to teach them since they were born—to be kind to one another, to show your love to the people who matter, to apologize when you make a mistake, and to just try your best no matter what.  I've told them time and again over the last year that it doesn't matter where we are or what we're doing, it's the being a family that matters most. 

This morning, I got confirmation that they hear me, deep inside, and that those lessons are being learned.  With so many things going wrong right now, it was a blessing to be able to see something that's going right.  And my babies are so, so right.

They fight and argue like all brothers do.  They have smart mouths and are too loud and messy—they are my children, after all.  But I also see how they curl up together to watch Doctor Who, how they make a point to still call each other "Bubber" (which is something they developed themselves years ago), and they always kiss each other goodnight.  They are sweet and affectionate and open with each other and with me, and this morning was just a moment of confirmation that I am managing to hold the most important thing together in the midst of so much chaos. 

So while I hate the financial situation we're in and know it may go on for a while, I am thankful to know that my children are coming through this okay, that they are comfortably relying on me to be their sun in a vast, dark universe and that I am helping them to blossom through the cracks. 

That means there's a little less mess to clean up, and a little less to fret about in the middle of the night. 

Show me your secret, and tell me your name. Catch me with your fizzy smile.

Men love to tell me their shit.  People, in general, will reveal private information to me pretty readily, but especially men.

I can fall quickly into easy conversation with almost anyone.  For all of my talk of being ignored when I go out by myself, it's not entirely true.  In the grocery store or out running errands, I talk with strangers all day long.  While I can be a little shy in the beginning, I'm pretty loquacious once I'm comfortable. 

But there seems to be something about me that just puts men at ease, to the point that they will share their deepest and darkest pretty quickly.  I have more unexpected details of random men's deviant pasts and sexual proclivities than I could write about in a lifetime.  (That doesn't mean it won't stop me from trying.) 

It has kind of become a joke within the Castration Committee, that I can walk into a room of a hundred men and point them out, the fragile cats, and pinpoint their damage on sight.  There's something about the way they carry themselves or a look in their eye; I just know who they are. 

Something about me seems to strike a chord, like they're seeing a kindred spirit for the first time.  I certainly have my own dramatic past, and I am more than willing to talk openly about it.  Even without revealing my own intimacies, they pick up on some aspect of my personality that makes them feel comfortable enough to tell me all the ways in which their parents and exes failed them, to describe how they clawed their way to and from their own rock bottoms, or to whisper their most lurid desires into my newly-acquainted ear. 

Maybe there's some pheromone that I'm releasing constantly.   Maybe they really can smell me in the air.  Maybe it's just that I am so damn attracted to the fragile, skittish cat and that I'm seeking them out without realizing it. 

Because I am a non-traditionalist in so many ways, I tend to gravitate toward the fringes.  I like strong personalities that lean toward the left.  I may be on the hunt for a great alpha male, but he would never be a hardcore Republican corporate attorney.  That may be perfectly fine for some people but not for me.  I like intense and creative and non-conformist, because that's where I find the intellectual stimulation I need coupled with the passion I crave.  Men like that, people like that, often come from dramatic and traumatic backgrounds, especially now that we're halfway through our lives. 

Part of me loves being in that position, of being a safe place of comfort for someone to off-load some of their strife for a while.  I am especially adept at filtering other people's energy and helping them carry what has become too much for them.  In the end, it's their job and not mine to deal with that baggage in the long term; I can't keep it for them forever.

 When it comes to men, though, I often find myself on the receiving end of sincere thanks, of hearing how I've changed and altered them and their perceptions of their worlds, how I've helped them deal with some shit so they could move on in a healthier way. 

Seriously?

How the hell did I become someone else's catalyst?  What is it about me that make me worth some time and a little effort, plus a hell of a lot of intensity, but not worth a longer-term relationship? 

I want to be that safe haven for someone for more than a day or a week or a few months.  I want to find that man who can share his heart and his life as easily as he shares his bed and his secrets.  I want someone who is willing to stick it out, who doesn't say, "Thanks for helping me deal with my fucked up head.  Have a nice life!"

There will always be issues with men like this.  Even the most reformed of the fragile cats remain skittish to a degree.  I'm the same way.  Every so often, I'm still surprised by a memory or recognition of something from my past that collides brilliantly with my present.  It scares the hell out of me when it happens.

What I need is someone who can be patient with me through that process, to continue to love me when I'm scared or angry or hurt, and not just because it's what feels right that day.  I want someone who can face the worst of me and still love me the next morning.  I expect myself to be able to love others with full openness and reciprocity; it is really too much to ask for the same?