Love, Shame, and Bleeding ALL THE TIME: Part One

 

Anxiety-humming in the background of all this year’s adventure has been my own personal mini-horror-movie—the yuckiest, most erratic, most alarming periods. Maybe post (2021) Covid weirdness, maybe perimenopause, definitely at least one fibroid.

All my period-having life before this, I had periods as regular as the moon. I tracked them with little red hearts on the calendar. If I was feeling sad or overwhelmed or crabby, I could mentally check when it might ease up. My period was a not-favorite friend. A routine so predictable as to be almost comforting.

Plus, most of that time, I was either not having regular sex or having sex with a lady who understood. Most men I’ve played with either didn’t overlap with periods or didn’t mind putting a towel down. I still had this weird, instrumentalizing fear that I couldn’t do “what I was there to do” with guys—sometimes being on my period made me feel naked and exposed, and not in the good way.

The Shy One, true to his name, didn’t prefer period sex. I was such a jerk about it once when we were in the middle of a fight about other things, and I regret that, but it still felt like kind of a patriarchal disdain was behind his non-preference. “Other women,” he’d defended, “Don’t like to have sex on their periods.” Maybe meaning..normal women? Clean women? Still, I transformed those fears into kindness and patience with him and DEEP resentment of my own misbehaving cycles.

I can’t tell how much of my shame in that relationship came from mirror-neurons, from me absorbing emotions he didn’t know he was giving off, and how much was projection, fear of religious people, fear of men. I have to admit, and this is pretty fucked up, that if his conservative background had been Christian instead of Muslim, I might not have made it to a fourth date. His conservatism felt less scary because it wasn’t my family’s brand, but I guess, patriarchy is patriarchy, and my own overcorrected bigotry is still bigotry.

Things to ponder as I keep realizing that life isn’t a romcom, that *love despite our profound differences* is maybe not the healthiest thing to believe in.

Anyway, periods. When he came home from his long trip home to Sierra Leone and we hadn’t seen each other in three weeks, he decided to brave period sex on a light day, inspired by missing-each-other horniness. There was a LOT in that day that maybe I’ll write about sometime, but the sex was profound, adventurous, and loving. “Oh thank you, thank you, THANK you.” I cried out as he entered me, always a little too grateful.

But he often did this thing where he pulled away after a date, whether to focus back on home and Mrs. Shy One or just focus back inside himself, where he preferred to be. Near the end, in that making-myself-small-so-I-don’t-have-to-lose-him phase, I felt crazy and needy for wanting him to be kind and loving after dates, instead of tuning me out for a few days.

In that void, I started to wonder if I’d traumatized the innocent boy with my never-not-bleeding vagina. There was this idea in my head that he was somehow cleaner than me, that she was cleaner too because she shared his aversion to period sex. In so many ways, I felt like they were normal and I was deviant. That she was pure and good and I was a guilty pleasure. And instead of realizing that was the awful nonsense that it was, I got madder and madder at my body, at myself.

Quarantine Crush (Because of Course) Part Three

So while I was drinking in all the poet love, feeling obnoxiously invincible as a writer, and surrounding myself with art and beautiful vistas, I was also, like anyone who moves across the country without a plan might, struggling to survive. I’d come to art school with way to pay for it, bad credit, and (Still so shocking!) no driver’s license. I was getting by on a narrow-to-no-margin, always hungry, sometimes rationing the groceries out to the tiniest detail. For most of my time in California, I slept on the floor in a pile of blankets rather than in a bed.

The Saturday night before I decided to leave, I was scheduled to work at the dress shop past the time the busses stopped running and I didn’t want to take a cab all the way from Fancy Beach Town to the suburbs where my third-apartment-in-two-years was, so I walked. It took three or four hours. It was so beautiful, following an emphatic moon and smelling the eucalyptus in the gentle night air.

I walked so much back then, and with no Spotify, no podcasts, and no audiobooks, I entertained myself by singing. Tori Amos’s “Leather,” Ani DiFranco’s “Little Plastic Castle” (The Russian Doll of its time.) “Amazing Grace,” “The Rainbow Connection” and Jeff-Buckley-Style “Halleluiah” before it became a cliché.

(I’d forgotten about the singing to myself until I read Lane Moore’s How to Be Alone if You Want to, and Even if You Don’t (SO GOOD! READ IT!) where she describes singing herself out of despair. In my case, I was singing myself out of boredom, and in these quarantine weeks, the urge to belt stuff out on the sidewalk has come back. I usually can keep it to just whistling through my mask, but sometimes I can’t help but sing along with my headphones, even though I know it must sound terrible.)

I had a poetry gig the next day and I’d hoped to sell some books so I could get some groceries. That almost always worked, but this time it didn’t. It felt like my synchronicity was broken, maybe it was. QC’s Adorable Cohost took me to Ralphs on the way home and bought me enough food to get me through until payday. I remember picking out one perfect green apple—produce seemed like an incredible luxury at the time!

I’d been having trouble with my roommate, an art student a little younger than me, and when her dad informed me that they were moving her terrible boyfriend in, he offered me 300$ to help me relocate. It would have taken at least a couple thousand to get my own place, and even though I was making pretty good commissions at the dress shop, first/last/security might as well have been a million dollars.

By the end of July 2001, I’d decided the only thing I could do was head back east. I boxed up everything I wanted to keep and mailed it c/o my mom. By the eighteenth of August, I landed on QC’s doorstep, bags packed, to stay a couple days before leaving home/going home.

Is It Weird That I Asked My My Ex-Wife to Pick Up My Christmas Tree? I Don't Care

I used the snow day today to start making next year's goals and to tackle two tasks that were giving me single-girl anxiety: dying my hair (next time going to a salon like a grown-ass woman) and putting up the Christmas tree. Those things done, plus a nice talk with Pagan Boy, helped soothe some of the sting and worry. On to the next things!

Single Life, Week One

That janky dungeon night was just a sliver of what the first week of single life was like—although at the moment I’m still feeling dark and soul-separated, most of the week was fine-to-lovely. Sweetie finally moved out the Sunday before last, and that was such a wistful, sad, nostalgic night. That night I took the opportunity to finally watch Blue Valentine (I’d always joked that if we watched it, we’d have no choice but to get divorced…) and feel all the sad things, but I also felt like we were much more awesome than that couple—that bar’s not superhigh, but still. After that, I cleaned my apartment and listened to Minx and Lusty Guy’s handfasting ceremony on Poly Weekly and that gave me something to hope for.

The week was stressful because I’m going through a series of evaluations at work, but that gave me something to focus on besides heartache, and the evaluation went okay. The woman whose maternity leave I was covering came back and moved all of her stuff into her new classroom, so it was a week of making myself at home and gaining closet space.

I love the feeling of getting the apartment arranged just for me. I’ve been settling in, decorating, and moving furniture around, putting away reminders of the relationship and getting ready for the new. By the way, artsy types, if you have any artwork to lend or donate, I’d be much obliged!

And then there’s the new bed. All I want to do is be in it, and sometimes I fantasize about getting somebody (or somebodies) to come over and break it in, but I think that might be a while. I’ve spent many a content hour wrapped up in my new comforter reading library books—that’s actually what Saturday was about, before that other stuff: home. Nesting and snuggling in here, I get a deep and true sense of well-being. Maybe the key to surviving the bad parts is to draw inward for a while, let it be about just me, not worry where I’ll fit in in the world, try not to be scared that it’s all gone. I think that’ll help. I’m almost certain that the world and its parties will still be there when and if I can heal.

How much should I be allowed to hang out with Sweetie? Yesterday it was so snowy, and I was so tired, and I had to get the groceries and go to the laundromat so I called her for help. We had a very pleasant afternoon slip-sliding to the Target and reading magazines while the clothes dried. I don’t know if this is allowed but it made me feel better. Maybe I don’t have to be all the independent at once? I don’t know, but I know I’m doing my best.

Not Just a Bed, but a Metaphor. A Bed-aphor

It came! And the old bed's out. We're still waiting to hear back from Sweetie's potential roommate, but at least the bedroom has moved to the next step. This is the first piece of furniture I ever bought for just me, and I'm proud that it looks better than the one I've been envisioning ever since we decided to divorce. Hope it's not too long before somebody nice comes along and ties me to it!

Divorce Times: The Holidays Are Bearing Down

Full disclosure: This post was partly precipitated by a touching scene in the new Bridget Jones novel. That’s how girly I am.

Things are happy and friendly between me and Sweetie. I still call her at the end of most days as she’s leaving work. I still high-five her over smutty achievements. But it’s over soon, and I’ll be alone.

She’s supposed to be moved out by the end of November and I have no idea how we are going to get to there. Free and self-actualized as I’ve been in the past few months, I suddenly don’t want it to be over; I don’t want to let it go. She’s been my best friend and my love for all these years. She’s been my family.

And I don’t know how to make it on my own. I was hired this year to cover a maternity leave and though I’ve been told I’m keeping the same position when that teacher returns in December, I don’t feel like I’ve been earning it, so I really don’t know WHAT is going to happen. Even as I’ve grown more confident and person-like, everything in my life feels more fragile and more precarious. I wish I knew what to do to get through it.

I’m trying to bring dungeon-confidence into the rest of my life, to plant my feet and smile big and know I’m worthy, to ask for what I need and scroll past rejection with grace. But after a lifetime of being apologetic about existing at ALL, none of this comes naturally, and the stakes are much higher at work than at play. Learning to fight the reflex to apologize and make myself small is rewarding but taxing. Mostly I just have to go to bed early a lot to give myself time to grow.

In a few weeks, the holidays will start. I’ll do my yearly Black Friday shopping with my sister and come back to the house with my holiday-themed Real Simple and one eggnog latte, not two. When I made my goals for this year, this is not where I saw it all going.

I’ll probably still ask Sweetie to set up my Christmas tree, and I’ll help her with hers as well. It’s tempting to skip Christmas altogether, but after all the years of assuming we didn’t deserve one because we didn’t have children, I am never going to unperson myself like that again.

We split up the decorations months ago, but how could we really? For years, our hobby was birdwatching and so people bought us bird ornaments. None of those birds could be just mine or just hers. It will take so much more work than I’ve yet admitted to take it all apart.

I need to both find some serious inner resources and also just give myself a break. I feel the way my special-needs students must feel sometimes—I’m trying to give life what it’s asking me for, but I don’t have all of the tools I need yet. I’m getting all kinds of accommodations and modifications (My therapist makes housecalls, for crying out loud!) but everything’s just hard and slow. I think this is why I over-identify with my students.

For all I love the future I’m doing an awesome job of building, I’m slowly mourning the family I made with Sweetie, the household rituals that have left us one by one. In a few weeks, friends will start disappearing into their own families and I am afraid of how alone I will feel. It’s all part of learning to love myself, but I don’t know how to face it.

Roadblock # 10: Calendar Fuss

Sometimes friends who are also readers express worry about having to change plans or other logistical stuff they think might not be up to my exacting specifications. I always feel so sheepish when that happens, nobody should have to feel self-conscious like that, and I and I don’t ever want anyone to think their OWN logistics don’t matter to me. Besides, purely platonic situations are never what triggers schedule-related panics, at least not lately.

Okay, so I really, really love to plan. I don’t just make my schedule, I curate it, and I do cling to it for comfort. Part of that’s just being poly and being a busy teacher lady, but also, I just spent a lot of years not doing what I want to do with my time, so I want to make sure I’m using it to get what I really want. Because, like most grownup people, I have such limited time for social stuff, any item I’ve written on the calendar is special and there for very specific reasons. I’m starting to understand that it’s not that deep for most folks, and that’s probably okay.

Part of calendar fuss is just good old-fashioned existential angst. Since I was about seven, I’ve been preoccupied with the finiteness of life. Nonetheless, I managed to, even after I remembered I was bi and realized I was poly, put off dating for about five years. I threw myself into work and poetry and art and expected those things to fill the holes left by missing relationships, by ALL OF THE VERY MANY missing penises. I avoided myself for so long, afraid to risk humiliation (at least that’s decidedly behind me), afraid of losing Sweetie, holding on to her for the safety when really we were the most unsafe thing.

It is my fault that I left the best parts of myself off the calendar for so long. I think that’s why I have the ongoing fear of the people I’m attracted to forgetting me—there’s such a bigbig part of me that I forgot, that I willfully ignored for so long.

Like all of the roadblocks, this one is about grief and being angry with myself. When I got explodey with Mr. Sweetheart over the summer for forgetting it was Wednesday, when I was overly vehement with Mr. Shiny Eyes for even flirting with the idea of switching to another Friday, it was partly from knowing those relationships couldn’t give me what I need, but I think I was also giving voice to the parts of me that are angry at being pushed aside by me and Sweetie for so many years.

Also there’s the more literal fact that I forget to give myself enough time alone. I’m half-introvert and I’m surrounded by people almost every minute, and it’s nobody’s fault but mine when I don’t make time to read magazines, hike, or just go to bed early.

But mostly, there’s this: I really do think that people might forget me, that I’m so unremarkable that I might just slip through the cracks of everyone’s full lives. With platonic friends, there’s an easy fix, I just pursue plans tenaciously and I’m as flexible as I can be. Noreally! Just ask Angel Face—he’s been in NREtown for a while and it sometimes takes several false starts until we have plans—this doesn’t stress me out at all.

But with sexytimes or romantic interests, it’s harder to fight the conviction that there’s always somewhere better to be than with me, the idea that they don’t think of me at all unless I’m present. This is why god invented pressing “like” and why I enjoyed the Cutest Boy so much—his texts were so constant that I barely had a chance to worry that he’d forgotten about me—and he was happy to tell me I was unforgettable any time I needed. A recipe for addiction, but still.

If I really like someone, a day on the calendar makes me feel more anchored to them. It somehow means that they are less likely to find something better and drift away. Writing a name on the calendar is like tying one end of a string to the balloon of them and tying the other end to my wrist.

For the years when I forgot/tried to squelch my guy-liking side (and all the kinky stuff that emerged along with it!) when I tried my heart out to be gay and monogamous, when I left entire body parts unexplored and neglected, I think I owe myself an apology. How’s this:

Dear Self,

I’m sorry that I took so much away from you and that you’re only beginning to find out how much you’ve been missing. I’m sorry I shamed you and let you be shamed, treated you so narrowly, harshly, and judgmentally. I’m sorry that I marched you through so much unhappiness when you could have been yourself and free. I’m sorry I defined you by tragedy, by defensiveness, by the things your stupid mother told you. I’m sorry I deprived you of all the penises for so many years, and I promise you they’re not suddenly all going to disappear again. I will try to never take away another thing because of meanness or fear or overprotection.

I’m going to do my best to try and get you everything, so I need you to just forgive me, chill out, and have a little more faith.

Love,

Me

As for the part where I think people will forget me, I’m trying to note all of the evidence that the best ones haven’t and won’t so that I don’t freak out when a cutie misses a call or doesn’t agree with me on the definition of “a couple of weeks.” Though it sometimes weeds out things I feel lukewarm about, I’m not going to let calendar fuss take away the stuff I really want. Lately I’m forced to admit that some of the best stuff can happen without planning, provided that I’m wearing cute underwear and/or am willing to grab someone’s hand and pull her into a parade.

But I’ll always be impressed as all getout by an asker-outer, by anyone who’s willing to be written in ink. Like reading me or “good girl,” it’s just another way to my heart.

Roadblock #6: More Family Nonsense

I hate telling sad stories because I don’t want you to see me as someone who thinks I’m a victim. I’m not. I’m a grown-ass woman and I hate that childhood things still affect me. I’m trying to write through it all so that I can move it aside in favor of better things.

Yesterday Sweetie got a letter in the mail from one of my aunts, a lovely heartfelt note of thanks and support, telling her she’s still part of the family no matter what. It’s a nice gesture and I’m so glad of any support that Sweetie gets, but at the same time, my own aunt hadn’t reached out to me. I had an irrational, childlike reaction and a wave of sorrow came over me. This is what I was afraid of, being The Bad Guy in the divorce. Something about that letter opened a fresh well of guilt and shame.

It’s a pretty huge leap, but I pictured my mom and aunt sitting around talking about how amazing Sweetie is and how selfish and awful I am for ending my marriage, how I never learned to love or be loved, how I’m a monster and Sweetie’s a saint. It was a semi-crazy reaction that plumbed the depths of childhood anxieties and fears, and tears welled up.

“I’m not doing this to hurt you,” I said to Sweetie, “I’m trying to do the right thing for both of us. There’s nothing wrong with me. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

But in my family’s eyes, I’ve always been something broken, I’ve always been someone who doesn’t belong, who keeps everyone from being happy and safe. My brother once said, after an argument he’d helped instigate, “You ruin every party.” That was a long time ago but it still shapes my self-concept in a fairly unhelpful way. I’ve always felt like I had to somehow earn my way in by finding some magic virtue.

The origin of this is so familiar as to be a cliché. I was an accident. When I was conceived, my Grandmom basically forced my parents to get married. (I suspect Roadblock #7 may be about Catholicism) Thus, my mother always saw me as the thing that took her life away. When she and my dad were fighting, show would often tell me it was my fault—if I hadn’t been born, she wouldn’t be with him, wouldn’t be getting beat up, and all of us would be safe, if only I hadn’t been so rude as to exist.

One of the ways that she expressed her resentment towards me was to automatically take the side of whomever I was in conflict with. If I was bullied on the school bus or picked on in any way, she’d always ask what I’d done to provoke it. I was trained to think of everything as my fault, even things I had nothing to do with.

So my mother and I were in constant tension, my sister was the favorite, and my brother’s just kind of an ass. As an adult, this meant I had a hard time finding a place in the family. Sweetie somehow ended up being my ticket in.

The way my mom tells it, Sweetie changed me into something better—calmer, more easygoing, just generally more acceptable. My niece came along around the same time, and that mellowed out EVERYONE in the family, reduced the general amount of jerkiness in all of us, and we got a second chance at having a happy family.

So one of the things that kept me married to Sweetie for longer than I should have been was the worry that this new version of my own family would go away if I didn’t have Sweetie around to make me acceptable. I’m almost 39 and my goddamn mother’s opinion of how I should live my life still holds power over me. After all of these many adult years, I still haven’t managed to separate myself from her.

In real life, my family has been supportive and kind about the divorce, but part of me is angry with them and really angry with myself for staying in a not-right marriage to try to earn their love. While I was able to approximate their version of love and marriage with Sweetie, the version that I really want is never going to be what they want for me. For whatever reason, my mother is never going to think I deserve for one man to love me, let alone three or four plus their partners and their partners’ partners. And I have to grow the fuck up and realize that neither Sweetie nor my mother is in charge of whether or not I deserve love. Every human being does.

Some people may see our divorce in traditional terms of the faithful partner and the unfaithful one, the heartbreaker and the victim, the winner and the loser, but that bears no resemblance to what actually is. We were both faithful in our own way, we were both victims and heartbreakers, and when this is all done, we will both be winners.

Even more important than letting go of Sweetie is letting go of the need for approval and creating the life I actually want, regardless of how the family might receive it. Until then, I need some distance from them, to carve out the time and space to just go ahead and grow the fuck up. I did it when I moved across the country at 24, and I can find a (less migratory) way to do it now.

Holy Crap, I Think I Might Have Mental Health.

Yesterday, I had a really irksome consult with a potential therapist. A few weeks ago, I crowd-sourced for depression advice and a facebook friend recommended a lady in the area who’s supposedly progressive.

It’s hard to compress 38 years into a 10 minute phone call, especially since it’s been such a complicated year. First, the lady said I couldn’t be depressed if I was having a good day—fair enough. Then she remarked that I sounded much younger than my age—maybe she thought I was pranking her? But who pranks by appointment? She was bothered by the fact that I sounded too cheerful: “You’re telling me these terrible things, but there’s laugher in your voice.” Jeez, I told you, I was having a good day and plus, what was I supposed to do, break down and cry about it to a stranger recommended by a facebook friend? Plus, in such a short conversation, I didn’t see there being time for histrionics.

Anyway, I wish this lady had just said “I don’t like you.” and left it at that, but she had to get a judgment in.  She said “I just don’t think I would be a good fit. I’ve worked with gay and lesbian clients but I don’t really work with polyamory—I think you have to be EXTREMELY mentally healthy for that.” The poly friend who recommended this lady can be proud of her squeaky-clean psyche, I guess!

I thanked the therapist for being honest, wrote her a strongly worded email (I really am becoming Greenberg…) and argued with her in my head all evening. Sweetie, being Sweetie, thought the lady was so wrong that she shouldn’t even warrant a mention, but she accidentally got me to some fantastic conclusions. Sometimes therapy happens in spite of incompetence, I guess.

First of all, having gone through a bunch of stuff doesn’t mean I’m not mentally healthy. In the past year, I’ve worked my ass off getting certified to teach, got hired right after graduation, and navigated several new relationships and breakups without major aftermath. By writing through it, I processed a lot of junk from the past on my own. My job is a nightmare sometimes but I end most days feeling happy anyway. I may need to find a better school but I know teaching is what I was meant to do.

And what The Man did was shitty, but it came nowhere close to breaking me. Yes, I cried, I freaked, I had pointless arguments on FetLife, but I also fought to change something that wasn’t right and I’m proud of that. When the fight was over, I walked, slept, read, hugged Sweetie, and went back to yoga and church.

I think that’s what mental health looks like. As I write this, I get a warm feeling in my back and shoulders that tells me it’s true. What I took for depression is just a transition, just a fucked-up breakup and a hard job.

There's nothing in my past or present that makes me unqualified for love, however I want to express it. It’s probably okay if people who don’t know me want to think I’m nuts. Yes, I have a lot of work to do. I have to practice hearing myself think, adapting to and working with jealousy, and being kind to myself in the presence of man-smell. But those things won’t be accomplished by delving into the past or by taking myself away from people. They’ll be accomplished by getting closer.

As a new teacher, people want to give me lots and LOTS of ideas to try, but I don’t need a mountain of ideas of how other people think I should be. What I need is to stop drowning out the voice inside me that knows what to do and how to get where I need to go. So thanks, mean stranger therapist-lady, for helping me realize that I had what I needed all along.

Confronting Family Shame

 It was a really wonderful Christmas this year, so much nicer than last year’s trapped and desperate feelings that I questioned the worth of my entire dating life. (As I write this, it’s exactly one year after that terrible-hot last day with Bill.)  This Christmas was made extra-festive by the addition of two brand-new family members—Sweetie and I spent most of the trip hugging our brand new baby nephew and bonding with my brother’s new girlfriend, who seems like she was never not in the family. All that plus bonus-visits with old friends made it such a joyous trip.

The worry came when I got home—I was checking the Kitten Calendar Twitter and reposting all the nice holiday shoutouts (superthanks, pals!) and discovered that my brother’s new girlfriend had followed me. My initial reaction was to feel flattered and relieved—there is a little strain to having a secret identity, and the idea of being outed was a little liberating—until I realized the full scope of what she’d be able to read. Then I felt my safe little bubble of a blog close around me and felt trapped and creepy. I became fully conscious of how this might all look to an outsider—just the fact that I was age-play adjacent seemed like enough to get me kicked out of the family. I felt so exposed that I was forced to sympathize with Fireguy’s reaction all those months ago. (Says Sweetie: “Hope you didn’t sympathize for too long…”)

(Really, the reason the Fireguy situation, especially the jealous-partner aspect, freaked me out so much was that it seemed to confirm a fear that I had about myself—that I was inherently harmful and could not get what I wanted without destroying things.)

Anyway, after I found the follow, I called Sweetie at work and just broke down at the idea of my family being able to read this. “I’m so dirty!” I kept saying. I imagined having my nieces and nephews taken away, never being able to hug the baby again. Because I’m an excellent catastrophizer, I extrapolated out to losing potential students as well. If a new family member could find me, then teacher friends could too, and everyone would know. (I found out you can search using a phone number and some phones even autosearch, but that’s an easy box to uncheck.)

Besides wife, family member, teacher, there’s another role I’ve always worried about having: Ruiner. I grew up in an unhappy family that somehow morphed into a happy one the year my niece was born and I met Sweetie. (They both came into my life in 2001, not long after 9/11.) I’ve always suspected that if I messed things up with Sweetie, then the whole happy-family thing would come crumbling down. Though I’m theoretically out to the family (via facebook and many non-Sweetie themed poems) about being bi and poly, I’ve only talked directly to my parents about it, and only when I was sad. (“Aren’t you just setting yourself up for heartbreak after heartbreak?” said mom, not unkindly.)

For some reason, my brother is the one I’ve always worried about telling, even though he’s an up-to-date reader of my poetry. I’ve always been sure that if I mentioned it directly, he'd tell me what a terrible, selfish jerk I am being to Sweetie and it would ruin whatever occasion it happened to be. I’ve always known that if I didn’t work out between me and Sweetie, I’d be the bad guy, and I’d have absolutely no one to turn to.

For all of the work I’ve done here, for all of the rooms and waves I’ve walked into naked, all it took was an accidental misfollow to bring me face to face with deep-seated shame, not just the suspicion but the knowledge that deep down, I’m dirty and bad and have nothing but destruction to offer.

These idyllic Christmases are wonderful and I wouldn’t want to trade them, but I know that to keep them the same, I’ve suppressed an important part of myself—the Christmas that I want someday, with a guy partner and his family and Sweetie would effectively end Christmas as we know it. When we got in the car to come home Tuesday night, I was so desperate to talk to her, to be our true selves, that we didn’t even put on the radio or podcast for two hours, just talked and talked.

My brother’s girlfriend has been blocked, and it’s likely that she didn’t see a thing. I’m glad that the whole thing opened my eyes to the shame that I still have to work against. I’m 38, for crying out loud, and I can’t keep worrying what my family will think, and I certainly can’t keep half-hoping that I’ll be suddenly be not-bi and able to keep things the way they are. As far as I’ve come, I still have to work hard to get myself to a place of authenticity, of naked safety. Other writers have found ways to write through (real or imagined) family suppression, so hopefully I can too.

About the Man About Town

The week before my birthday, I kissed four people, which is maybe too many. The only one of those that you haven’t heard about yet is the Man About Town.

I’m calling him that because he’s got a lot of community stuff going on—his art is in local galleries, he’s in the pagan community, and he’s a leader of the local poly meetup, which is how I got to know him. I’d seen him around for about a year, but one night a few months ago during a poly book club meeting I noticed that he’s my type--big and bearish, warm, fond of easygoing public nudity. So I sent him a friend request on Fet Life and I guess my pictures did the trick. We exchanged emails all summer. He’s looking for a new play partner, so we made plans.

Our first date, during that week-of-kissing-four-people, was a hiking date on my favorite leisurely trail. We talked and talked and talked. Then sometimes we talked ABOUT the talking. I felt really comfortable with him and was as confessional as I would’ve been if I’d had two glasses of wine. I told him SO MUCH STUFF and he told me a lot too. It was like a miracle of yammering, I loved it.

I was trying to remember the name of a butterfly* that was helpfully splaying out its wings for us to study when I felt him move in for the kiss. He was gentle, a little tentative, technically proficient, but I’m not sure what I felt, emotionally. Still, I was impressed, and I couldn’t resist high-fiving him and saying “Good job!”

Then I was like “Wait, is that okay to say? good job?”

“Of course!” he said, “Feedback is always welcome.”

Man About Town is close with Fireguy’s crowd, so I talked to him a lot about that situation, which is good because it means that some disclosures are out of the way. It was a relief to talk about that stuff, I’d been afraid to for a while.

The Man About Town is just that, a man. So far, he makes me feel valued, understood, and oriented. My first date with him was a pretty island in the sea of insecurity that was the end of Mister Hazel Eyes. I got home that day feeling comfy in my own skin, pleased to have the rest of the day alone with a good book, not needy or clingy but self-contained.

He asked me out right away, but I was feeling really overwhelmed about everything else that was going on. I told him I needed a month or so to get back on my feet before any more non-Sweetie dates. Then, a few days later, I asked if I could put him on the calendar for the end of September so I’d have him to look forward to. He had absolutely no problem with planning things three weeks in advance, and that is so dreamy. I’m not sure how I feel about him, but I am so proud to have made plans with a grown ass man. Go me.

*the butterfly was a "red spotted purple"

Two Songs for a Good Beach Re-do

It might have just been the beach endorphins, but I was really glad to run into the Mayor of Kittentown and Monogamous Girl at the beach yesterday. You wouldn’t think so, after last time, but it was really illuminating.

They were coming down the path as I was leaving, which meant that we helpfully all had clothes on. He looked so handsome and she looked beautiful—they were glowing with health and happiness. In my version of reality, I would have happily pounced on both of them, but what really happened was, I felt a teensy little glimmer of compersion.

MG and I shook hands bravely. MKT told me about a baby horseshoe crab they’d seen. It reminded me of my nature-y endeavors with Sweetie, so how could I not be charmed? A few moments of chitchat and it was over, and I felt a great sense of accomplishment on getting past that initial awkward. (Though, knowing both of us, I’m sure there’s more awkward to come.) I texted him a *high five* when I got back to cell phone range.

I have to begrudgingly admit that my little jealous breakdown on the beach a few weeks ago is probably a good thing in the long run. It was another (like the millionth) reminder that he was a bigger deal to me than I thought, that I have to stop trying to be casual girl when what I really want is long term relationships. (Just like Rory Gilmore!) More importantly, it pushed me past Mister Hazel Eyes a little faster than I might have gone, and I’m starting to see that as a good thing.

Being ready for (or at least preferring) someone with the possibility for a long term relationship is a healthy and honest thing for me. I am grateful that MHE is behind me if it makes me more open to what comes next. It is time to start believing in love and doing what it takes to get there.

Here are some nicely bittersweet songs from the drive home: