Unsatisfied

I had crazy self-harm thoughts running around my head before I went to sleep. Actually, not self-harm, suicide. Just thoughts, no impulse to do them, but also not nice. I did get off eventually and slept all the way through until morning.

I am not feeling good though this morning. Sex yesterday had left me feeling quite low. Husband was doing some great stuff and then suddenly stopped with “that’s enough of that”, which confused me, then we did a bit more and again he stopped. Eventually he gave me a kiss and “left me to it”. I struggled on alone until I had a very unsatisfactory orgasm. I didn’t really want to have one, but I was curious and I had saved it for my husband and he didn’t want it. It was bloody hard work and didn’t feel like much. I need to talk to my husband about it, but there will be no time today as I’m seeing my dad.

There’s an expression I see on my husband’s face that I’m not used to seeing; I mean, it’s been there for a while (like a couple of months), but it’s not an expression that belongs there: it seems to suggest that he’s holding something back, it looks like something less than honest. Of course, I might be putting the expression there from my own insecurities, but it is congruent with what he tells me of feeling unwilling to share his feelings anymore. It doesn’t belong there because his defining personality trait is honesty: to be dishonest is toxic for him – it will make him mentally and physically unwell. This is what I’ve done to him.

In one of Frank Herbert’s many “Dune” books, a human skill/mutation known as truthsaying is developed whereby an individual instinctively knows when another is lying. One character, when asked how this power worked, says that they know when another is lying when they themselves want to turn their back to them. That is how I feel about my husband. Not that he’s lying, but that there are things he is not saying that he feels or thinks. Maybe I am just being hypersensitive.

Maybe I’m just missing something that I used to take for granted.

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A day with my dad

I couldn’t (or more accurately didn’t want to) see my dad on my birthday; not the day after because I’d planned on having a drink and I take my alcohol responsibly, when I do drink. I’d intended to see him for the day today.

I don’t think he’d realised that it was my fiftieth; it matters only as much as I noticed and I suppose I am slightly disappointed, but I’m not crushed. I am also glad that he’s no longer going nuts with money presents: it was a much more sensible amount. He tends to over-compensate through his generosity.

There were a few things I wanted to talk to him about. The first was an historical issue, which the more I think on it, the more it upsets me.

Many years ago, at a party at a relatives house, my father commented that gay people should not have children. This upset me and my husband, who already had four by a previous marriage.

My husband was upset that I’d never stood up to dad and told him that what he’d said was offensive. Today I decided that I wanted to address this very old issue: it kept coming up between my husband and myself and I wanted to check it out. Possibly pointless, but there was a chance that he’d mellowed some on the intervening years.

I needn’t have bothered.

Firstly, it seems that I had already told him about it! I’d forgotten, he remembered! I now recall why I never told my husband: dad had stuck to his position then and there was nothing positive to report to my husband.

Dad’s position hadn’t changed. In so many ways he is a remarkably liberal man for his generation. His use of language can be a little archaic (read offensive) but no unkindness is meant and he defends weaker and more vulnerable people when he can.

However, in his opinion, gay adoption shouldn’t be allowed as “against nature”. I pointed out the gay penguins adopting eggs, I forgot to point out that nature usually leaves the mother to look after the kids, or the step-father routinely murders his step-children. I commented that people regularly produce kids they can’t afford or don’t want, or do want but cannot care for, or bring children into the world and then abuse them. He’s heard Elton John say that his own son had been bullied at school and that EJ sometimes regretted having a child for that reason. One exception and that’s what sticks in his head.

He then went on about kids getting bullied at school; I said the problem isn’t gay parents it’s the rest of them allowing bullying to happen! Kids have to be taught to hate. I remembered a family of German kids across the road as a kid that I was told to avoid because they were German. As a child I had no opinion on where somebody came from:

prejudice is inherited, love is inherent.

I said that I felt hurt and offended by what he said, but it was clear there was going to be no movement and I let the subject drop. I am glad that I never have him grandchildren. I wish I could have given grandchildren to my mum. I feel weak for letting it go again.

Usually, I can accept different opinions without trying to change them, however when they directly affect my rights I find that rather difficult to do.

The other was to sound out how he might feel about me. I asked him what he thought the phrase “non-binary” meant. He went straight into talking about numbers and how is inappropriate to use numbers to refer to people.

I said that I was specifically thinking of the binary genders of male and female, and that non-binary means that somebody didn’t feel like they are fully one or the other, or are maybe both. He then contained to say that people weren’t numbers and couldn’t be categorised and started telling me a story about old colleagues if his complaining that they weren’t numbers as they clocked in and out of work. I’m afraid I gave up: I was still feeling hurt over the gay parenting thing.

I was starting to feel a little tired and being talked at and not able to get a word in it explain myself was tiring. I suppose I am hoping that he will have a think about it and I can pick it up with him later.

Perhaps I should stop trying to get his acceptance and approval: for the child of an abusive alcoholic father himself, he has done well to break so much of the chain. Perhaps I need to give it what I want to have for myself: acceptance.