Archive | February, 2012

Secrets of a (Gay) Marriage

29 Feb

Photo by Our Labor of Love

I was in the first grade the first time I heard about divorce. My friend Heather’s parents were headed for it. Frowning, my mother explained what that meant. I remember hearing with wonder about how Heather’s parents would live in separate houses and she would go back and forth between them. My own parents were much more unhappy than Heather’s parents had ever seemed to me. Oh how I wished my parents would divorce!

Now I’m married (illegal as it may be) with kids. We have none of the fighting and philandering that defined my parent’s marriage but we’ve had our problems. Three months after our first baby was born, we came within inches of divorce. I recently shared this information with a friend who is struggling in his marriage, and he was stunned. Up to that moment, we had represented “shining beacons of trouble-free couplehood” to him. (His actual words.) Just hearing about how close we came to ending it all, and that we made it back from the abyss, made a big difference in his perspective on his own relationship.

In our culture, most weddings are stressful but joyous events where friends and relations gather to kick-off the marriage of two hopeful people. When all the cake is eaten and the last drunk, sweaty guest is pulled from the dance floor, the happy couple is wished well and sent forth. Alone. They might be given some vague instructions like “never go to bed angry” or “marriage takes work” but mostly well-wishers only smile and hug them and say “Good luck!” (while making mental predictions about how long this will last). Our wedding, gay as it may have been, was no different. For some people, this works out fine. They’ve either had good marriage role models or they’re magical creatures who’ve managed to intuit and enact healthy relationship models in the face of an omnipresent parade of nightmarish examples.

For others, things fall apart when they hit the first or second or fifth major bump in the relationship road. My partner and I had some issues from the beginning, mostly communication-related, that caused a poisonous build-up of resentment and slow erosion of trust over a five year time span. I’m an emotional, talk-it-to-death kind of person, given to blubbering. My partner is far more reserved, stoic nearly, given to holding it all in. You can imagine how well this worked for us. After bumbling through a difficult and expensive journey of trying to conceive, we were thrilled to welcome our first son. My partner was mired in a PhD program though and I had my own business that required me to work seven days a week. We were cranky, bewildered parent ships passing in the lonesome, desolate night for months.

That’s really not even the half of it but I’m not one to publish the particulars of our marriage meltdown on the internet. Suffice it to say that:

Things

fell

apart.

For me, the situation was made worse by this new, brilliant kind of love that I felt for our son. Whereas my love for my partner was entangled in and half-choked by our issues and past wrongs, my love for my son seemed to course visibly in the electric air between us, pure and robust and incomparable. Sure, he kept me awake night after night and repeatedly threw up into my hair, but my heart pounded, my brain shut up, and birds burst into song whenever I gazed at him. Which was a lot like how I felt when I first met my partner. Which made me wonder if it shouldn’t still be like that with my partner. And if it should be but wasn’t like that, then maybe we weren’t “meant for each other,” and I wasn’t about to do what my parents did by wasting my life and raising my kids in a doomed, miserable marriage!

No, thank you.

Unfortunately, we had that “shining beacons of trouble-free couplehood” reputation among a lot of our friends, partly because we were one of the first to get married in our social group, but also because we had both had public, terrifically bad relationships prior to meeting each other, so this time around we were careful to keep our (comparatively minor) conflicts private. Thus, we didn’t feel like we could reach out much to our friends because it was embarrassing to acknowledge that our mythic status was undeserved. Besides, involving friends has its own complications. They don’t always forgive and forget when you need them to. They feel uncomfortable or unwilling or uninterested in viewing your dirty laundry. They may have ulterior motives, even subconscious ones, for the advice that they give.

We felt additional pressure to appear publicly unbreakable because of our sexuality. We knew that people in our own families, as well as many more strangers, would be pleased to see us, a queer couple with a young baby, break up, as though our personal dissolution would somehow lend credence to their belief that same-sex relationships are unnatural and unhealthy and bad for children. It made me sick to give those people that satisfaction, even though I knew they’d be wrong about all of it. (When straight people divorce or co-exist miserably for decades, that has no bearing at all on the validity of heterosexuality or its effects on children.) I couldn’t quite articulate why I wanted so badly to have a wedding when we did, in a place where we’d receive no legal benefit.  It felt meaningful and natural and vaguely necessary for us, but also like a jubilant and glittery F-you to the anti-gay people in our lives, which I won’t lie, I enjoyed. But it took testing the bonds of marriage to understand what I must have had premonitory knowledge of somehow: the only thing holding us together in some of our darkest hours seemed to be a distant, misty memory of that magical day, and the awful specter of erasing it.

Photo by Our Labor of Love

Still, the recollection of our earnest promises couldn’t fix us. We needed professional help for that.

So we spent almost two years in couples counseling. Our insurance didn’t cover it but we were lucky enough to find someone who let us pay a sliding-scale fee of $35 per session. This was a significant strain on our finances because we needed a lot of work at first. Financial strain was one of our major stressors too, but we viewed therapy as a necessary investment in our future together, without which that future might cease to exist altogether. In other words, if our house had a big hole in the roof, we would have somehow found the money to fix it, rather than abandon the house outright or hope everything would be fine eventually, while rain poured on our bed and our belongings putrefied and returned to nature.

Therapy saved us.

We learned how to talk to one another about difficult subjects, how to repair damage when it’s done, and how to identify and then ask one another for what we need. (Why weren’t these topics covered in Home Economics? They seem far more useful than proper hand dishwashing technique.) We’re more content and healthier now than on our wedding day. The bliss of new motherhood for me gave way to something very similar to the seasoned, mature love I continue to have for my partner. I’m so glad we did not divorce. Still, we’re not trouble-free. If we’re shining beacons of anything, I want it to be as an example for our married or long-time partnered friends to seek help when they need it, before they reach that woeful, proverbial point of no return.

Of course, not everyone should stay together. There are a lot of circumstances that cannot be repaired and actions that can not be absolved. My parents finally divorced when I was seventeen after fooling most of their friends and relatives into thinking that they were shining beacons of trouble-free coupledom for nearly three decades, with happy-looking family photos and enthusiastic year-end wrap up letters sent at Christmastime. My mother’s life, at least, dramatically improved as a result of her divorce. But if you’ve “grown apart” or worry that you’ve “fallen out of love,” and you’re looking out at your comrades in wedding rings thinking that they’re so much more together, more in love, and happier than you, remember that you might just not know the half of it. One or two of them may even be able to refer you to their secret, heroic therapists.

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There’s More Than One Answer to These Questions or How I Learned to Stop Being Angry at my Sister for Being Anti-gay

25 Feb

It was dark and humid, and I was 18, driving my battered Honda civic through the orange glow of Atlanta streetlamps while my older sister explained how glorious it felt to be in love and about to be married from the passenger seat. I hadn’t planned to come out to her. Not then. But her face was all lit up as she talked. Her smile was wide and irrepressible just like mine lately, and I swelled with hope. I was in love too. Maybe we could forget our differences for a moment to frolic together in the hazy, crazy fog of love. I said, “But what if you felt all of those things, everything you’ve just described, but you felt it for someone of the same sex?” My sister’s smile fell. She turned to me, and in the ghostly halogen light of a grocery store parking lot, she said, “Is that how you feel?” I nodded. She replied, gravely, “The world has fallen and Satan has turned you.”

I don’t remember much after that except that we returned to my apartment and I retreated to the screened porch while she used my computer inside, probably to tell her fiancé that her maid of honor just revealed herself to be a godforsaken lesbian. To her credit, she didn’t revoke my wedding duties, not even after I (still in that crazy fog of love) let my girlfriend shave my head a few weeks before I was due to precede her down the aisle.

It’s been fourteen years since that summer. We’ve mostly lived in different states which made avoiding each other easy. Occasionally on family trips or during holiday visits, something would be said and one of us would blow. Ugly, angry tears would follow. Someone would storm out.  When I was 25, I fell in love again. This was it. My own wedding was finally on the horizon. It was time to deal with the situation between my sister and me once and for all. I wrote what I thought of as a dispassionate letter. In it, I told her she was judgmental and had a narrow worldview. I offered studies and statistics to refute all the things she thought she knew about gay people. I explained that she could either support me and stay in my life, or get out. Rereading it now, I see that’s it’s a bit of a manifesto. It couldn’t be more passionate. It’s a written caterwaul.

When she read the letter, she called me and left three tearful, distraught messages on my voicemail. I felt heartsick listening to them. But I also believed I was right and had done what I had to do. In a follow-up conversation, I asked her if she’d rather me be unhappy in a relationship with a man or happy with my partner. She chose the former. Two years later, I chose the latter and married my partner before family and friends. My sister did not attend. She sent flowers though.

Nothing really changed as a result of that letter. Instead, my sister and I gradually resumed our awkward, eggshell interactions at family functions. My partner and I started on our own little family. During my pregnancy, my sister shared with me over the phone that she had struggled with how she would explain our baby to her four children without “degrading” us. I was so angry and hurt by her word choice that I barely responded. She decided she would tell them that I was a single mother and that my partner was just a friend who would help me raise the child. From the tone of her voice, I could tell she thought this was a perfect solution. She wouldn’t have to tell her children we were abominations. Wasn’t that great? But, inadvertently, she had degraded us by pretending our relationship, our love, our life, and the family that we were building together weren’t just wrong; they didn’t even exist.

When I gave birth, my mother, aunt, brother, and sister drove to Atlanta to meet the baby. We all went to brunch for his first outing. Halfway through our meal, my son bobbed at my shoulder, mouth wide open like a baby bird. I panicked and asked aloud if I should retreat to the car to nurse him. My sister encouraged me to nurse him right there at the table. In the tenderest moment we have ever shared, she helped adjust a blanket over my chest while my son mewled underneath and I, awash in the strange out-of-body experience of first time public breastfeeding, avoided eye contact and fumbled with bra clips. That my conservative, fundamentalist Christian sister was the one shepherding me through (what shouldn’t be but is) a socially controversial act added a level of emotional vertigo that still brings tears to my eyes.

I wish I could say that moment begot more tender moments between us but parallel motherhood didn’t bring me and my sister together the way that I’m sure our mother prayed it would. Last summer, my partner got a job 90 miles from the North Carolina town where the rest of my family resides. We moved just a few months after I gave birth to another son. Being within a two hour drive of my mother and aunt, with whom I’m very close, has vastly improved our lives as parents of young children. Just having extra pairs of reliably loving hands nearby (relative to how far away we were before) has eased my mind on my toughest days as a stay home mom. We regularly strap the kids in the car for last minute trips to Granna’s house. But our increased and unpredictable presence has been challenging, albeit quietly so, for my sister. She and her family tend to avoid gatherings where the four of us will be in attendance, or they arrive and leave quickly. Their absence has been both a relief and an ache.

As my children get older, I feel the pressure mounting to find some kind of final resolution, some way to protect them from this madness. My oldest son frequently asks when he’ll see his cousins, whom he adores. I need answers for him. I need a plan for birthday parties and future holidays. I need to set some boundaries. And then, all at once, I got it. Perhaps it was a precise accumulation of nights passed soothing feverish babies, plus a handful of accidental toddler head butts to the nose, and another unsuccessful dodge of the changing table pee fountain for good measure and voila! Somewhere in my head a heretofore locked door swung open and understanding flooded in.

I need to let go.

Nearly all of my life I felt inferior to my sister. Growing up, she was the pretty, skinny, blond, straight-A, easy athlete, dream daughter. I was the freckled, thick-bodied, brown-haired, weird and not athletic, parent’s vexation. For a couple of glorious years in my mid-teens, my sister and I were not so opposite. I was finally thin (by way of an eating disorder) and felt more attractive (thank you, Covergirl Guide to Makeup with Christie Brinkley VHS). I found power in my other differences, and stopped seeing my sister as perfection incarnate. She was in college by then and I was in the middle of high school. We wrote cheerful letters back and forth, and sent care packages. When I was 16, we road-tripped together to see one of her favorite bands, the Indigo Girls, at an amphitheatre in Virginia. I remember being entranced as I watched Amy Ray aglow under the stage lights, stomping, and bawling into the microphone. Her aggressive guitar strums thrummed through my chest. She was so brazen, so tough, and so different than any woman I’d ever seen. I couldn’t stop thinking, “She is so…so amazing… so cool!” What I meant of course was that she was so hot. My sister and I danced and screamed and laughed together. Afterward, we blasted 1200 Curfews on the car stereo, high on the concert experience and our shared affinity, as we sailed out of the the parking lot and onto the highway home.

Two years later, we sat in that same car, not laughing. My sister was clearly no longer an Indigo Girls fan. (She never explained why or how she so quickly went from the kind of Christian who enjoys lesbian singer/songwriter music to the fundamental variety who condemns it, but I suspect it was her husband-to-be’s influence.) With my sister’s response that night, our original dynamic returned. I didn’t agree with what she said, but over the next few years, it seemed the evidence was on her side. She got married and had kids while I drank and wrote tortured poetry through three hellishly unhealthy relationships. When I saw the “God Hates Fags” protesters at Atlanta Pride each year, I imagined my sister and her family among them, glowering at me. But like my teenage transformation, once I found my partner and had my first child (and dealt with my unhealthy coping mechanisms), I began to feel the power balance returning. My sister the Christian no longer had the lock on marriage and family. I was doing both differently, queerly, and loving it. I could finally see that we are once again sharing an affinity. My sister and I dearly love our respective little families, and we are both fierce mama bears determined to protect our children and to bring them up safely and conscientiously in this chaotic time.

My little family’s existence and the way the rest of our family treats it as a non-issue threaten a huge foundational part of what my sister is trying to instill in her children. Which is just like how her beliefs and palpable avoidance of us threaten a huge foundational part of the kind of childhood I’m trying to build for my children. We’re both worrying about our kids being tainted or harmed simply by their exposure to the other’s values. Yet my sister and I were once kids who grew up in the same mildly religious house in the same manure-scented country town where we smashed the same berries on our faces for play makeup and endured the same wacky, revolving cast of visiting uncles and cousins and grandparents, and yes, once upon a time we even danced at the same Indigo Girls concert, but we veered off on wildly different tracks, and came to be the people we are today through complex constellations of experience, personality, influence by others, and chance. That’s a little terrifying to contemplate. But it’s also liberating, and it’s helping me release my white-knuckle grip on this whole situation.

My sister has expressed remorse for the way she reacted the night I came out to her so many moons ago. Given the chance for a do over, I think she’d form a more compassionate response now. She still believes that any romantic relationship outside of man/woman Christian marriage has dire spiritual consequences but she also believes that even my children, byproducts of an alleged unholy union, are part of her God’s plan. I don’t get how that works, nor do I understand why my sister feels so strongly about homosexuality in particular.  I also don’t know how I’ll explain all of this one day to my kids, should they ever ask. Lucky for all of us, I have many more moons to think before my boys start mulling such deep questions. I really want to be able to answer them honestly, without degrading her.

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Parenting without gender expectations means accepting all outcomes.

15 Feb

Recently, I took my two and a half year old, Avie, to a Toddler Music and Movement class that, thanks to him, devolved into something more like Toddler Music and Mosh Pit. Most of the other kids were girls who twirled or held hands in groups of three or four and happily, dreamily, skipped around in circles while music played. Avie stomped, put his hands on the floor and kicked one foot up in his classic “trick” pose, ran around in his own circles wind-milling his arms, and finally, purposefully, crashed into one of the girl groups and knocked them down. Too far away to intervene in time, I watched in horror as I recognized the following flicker of cognition in Avie’s eyes. He saw the girl pile on the floor as a perfect opportunity for a pile on. So, without further ado, he flopped right on top. You can imagine how well this went over with the girls and their mothers.

I want to preface the rest of this by saying that I’m a parenting agnostic. After three years of poring over “expert” opinions, searching online forums, reading mommy blogs, chatting tentatively with other parents in real life, joining and fleeing a parenting cult or two, engaging in fierce Facebook battles, and amassing thousands of hours of personal experience, I’m done. For me, there is no right way and no infallible guru or philosophy. There are plenty of theories and plenty of critics. Every day I realize more and more how much of what I do as a parent is experimental. What worked yesterday might not work today or next week. I’ve got my guiding principles but otherwise it’s all improv, and sometimes, oftentimes, a whole lot of flailing.

One of the guiding principles my partner and I are committed to is raising our kids with as few gender limits as possible. Our intent is not to make them genderless or feminine. We only hope that by giving Avie and his little brother, Izzy, the space and support to grow and explore without oppressive expectations, gender and otherwise, we will promote a foundation of emotional health for them. (This does not mean we’re raising them without any expectations, just that we’re trying to refrain from imposing those that we believe to be oppressive.) Most of the critical work lies ahead of us when our boys begin to absorb our culture’s pervasive negative gender messaging at school and beyond. In the meantime, their drawers are full of colorful clothes and their toy boxes overflow with musical instruments, play kitchen gear, vehicles and every sort of ball, and carefully selected children’s books. When our boys get hurt or feel sad, we validate their tears and offer lots of hugs. We’re also cautious about the language we use to describe them, using words like tough and strong sparingly, but generously calling them smart, creative, funny, and gooses. (Who knows what kind of harm that last one will do.)

So, I was a little rattled when around Avie’s 2nd birthday, a parent friend described Avie to me as “all boy,” implying that Avie was more boyish than his own son. I trusted my friend’s judgment but reeled as I tried to understand what he meant. I still thought of Avie as my baby then, my sweet, sometimes irascible but cuddly, little buster baby. He wasn’t  even a boy to me yet.  And he definitely wasn’t more boy than other boys. But a real live masculine man and parent of another boy thought he was. And anyway, why did this bother me?

Not long after, on an extended-family vacation, Avie tumbled around with his older-but-not-much-bigger cousin, Seth, in a week-long dominance struggle. “Where’s Seth?” he asked once, holding a large metal flashlight. When asked why he wanted to know, he replied, “I want to hit him.” The family members present didn’t take him seriously until they heard Seth’s cries minutes later.  Then Avie saw the movie Puss and Boots and fixated for a while on threatening others with “sharp things” like sticks and broom handles.  Later, we joined a playgroup where I discovered that Avie was consistently the most likely to induce tears and/or injury among the other friendly boys and girls. Then we arrived at the toddler mosh pit experience.

I began to see what my friend saw. Avie is a physical kid. He has a lot of energy, a strong will, and little fear. I love these things about him. But as I’ve watched him grow and repeatedly menace our cat with heavy objects, growl at kids on the playground, and belly-flop on girl piles, a fear that I had failed in my pursuit to nurture compassion in my oldest son grew too. (Briefly, I also worried that I’d born a sociopath.) I had been so convinced that, if given a supportive family environment, boys can be just as empathetic and thoughtful as girls. And okay, I admit it: I was harboring a little internalized misandry. I half-consciously believed that “all boy” kids were only like that because they were fed steady diets of macho BS. Well, a funny thing happened. Our special aforementioned guiding principle efforts led us straight to this: a roaring, hitting, sharp thing-wielding, playground tyrant, bear of a boy child (in purple pants).

And then I realized there’s nothing wrong with that. He’s only (almost) three and a lot of kids his age are wild beasts regardless of their home environments. Besides, at least one part of my failure was perception.  Avie is all of the above but he is also affectionate, considerate, and sensitive. He was an early talker and sits in rapt attention for books and movies. He tells me that he loves me often, and hugs and kisses me and Izzy and his Duda (my partner) all the time.  When Avie’s feelings get hurt (and they do, easily), he’ll sit in another room and hang his head until I find him to talk it out.  He picks me flowers, sings songs, tells elaborate stories, and cannot go to sleep without cuddling with one of us.  I see now that most of this softer side of Avie emerges at home. Out in the world, he’s still learning how to relate to others (Heck, at 32, so am I!) and for whatever reason, be it nature or nurture or neither, he just feels most comfortable presenting as “all boy” in public.

 When I shared the toddler mosh pit story on Facebook, a friend and comrade in parenting outside the gender binary joked that we should come over “so Avie can hunt some game in the backyard while [her daughter] tries on dresses and bakes cookies.” I laughed and cringed, and I “liked” it.

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