Mom said that the reason the country was so far astray
(besides, presumably, Socialism) was that we’re “no longer” a Christian nation.
(I remember seeing this “One nation under God” idea in second-cousiny Facebook
feeds before I blocked them, but the violence of the sentiment never truly hit
me until I started writing this.) I wish I had said something coherent about
the founders or the Liberty Bell or Catholicism under Hitler, but I did not. I
wish I’d said that forcing everyone into the same religion was not only counter
to the values of Christianity (well.) but part of the very definition of
fascism.
So that was the conversation that finally propelled us
out the door. On the way out, I told mom not to contact me, not to send cards
or anything, a directive that she (vexingly and also sort of touchingly) has
ignored. In the car, I horror-movie screamed. Back in the Nineties, I was in a
housefire and the small comfort of that day was that I got the line “Screaming
like a David Lynch movie” on the news. This wasn’t that, wasn’t any
aesthetically tortured wail, it was full horror. It was a scream of a lifetime
of religious oppression, of standing in front of police cars, of friends boxed
into riots when the street-fires were starting. It was a scream for the then-200,000
dead and those who were vicious and scared and stupid enough to deny the loss.
Because it was a scream, I’m embarrassed and ashamed, but I can’t actually
think of a more rational response.
As Sweetie (Never, anymore, afraid of a panic) drove
us down the country roads to my sister’s, I did that five senses thing to quell
the panic: I see mailboxes, road, a sparrow, a yellow stripe, my purse. I hear
the car, my voice, Sweetie’s voice, my breath. I can touch the door, my scarf,
my jeans. I can smell coffee and peach-pear fizzy water. I can taste gum.
By some miracle of compartmentalization, a skill that
has never come naturally to me, we spent a lovely day with the niece and
nephews. Our regular comic shop was closed, but we did thoroughly enjoy our
traditional thrift store run. I bought way too many random things.
By the time Sweetie and I were picking up road trip
coffee in our nearby old hometown (SO many feelings of love and beauty and loss
there) I was posting through my feelings and starting to make estrangement
official. I told my sister, brother, and dad the next day that I would be
avoiding all mom-related activities for the foreseeable future.
For now, it’s not so bad, except those nauseating
prayer cards on which I need to remember to write “refused”. I run the family
Zooms and the Liberal Cousins Side Convo has been great at keeping in touch. I’ll
feel guilty adding extra logistics to the family routine, but I’ll figure it
out as I go.
I’ve never understood how people with Trumpian relatives
can feel safe around them, even pre-Covid. I don’t know how anyone avoids
feeling the violence of their beliefs all the way in their bones. Do they think
that the violence the seditionists marinate in won’t come for them? Do they
interpret violent beliefs toward black and brown and queer bodies as somehow
not a real threat? Or are they just too
scared to do something about it? At any rate, I’m glad of these miserable years
of trying to do something about it, even when that something is only to try and
get myself safe.
Since I started (glacially) writing this series, I’ve
found out what it’s like to check the FBI’s terrorist photos to see if I find
family members. (I didn’t. Just lots of reasons for my vagina to pack her bags
and move away someplace safe.) Fascist Beach Aunt and Fascist Former Favorite
Aunt, “Women for America First” that they are, had planned to be in DC on 1/6
to “save the country.” My brave and wonderful cousins talked Fascist Beach Aunt
out of going (She and Worst Fascist Uncle have since renounced Trump, or at
least taken their shrine down.) but I think Fascist Former Favorite Aunt did
go. I would like to think that she was maybe further back in the crowd, but,to
paraphrase that one attacked Capitol Police officer, fuck her for being there. I
want to ask FFFA’s kids about this, but I’d like to keep our Liberal-to-Moderate
Cousins’ Among Us night as cordial as possible.
Anyway, back to Fascist Mom. Last fall, Sweetie and I
planned an apple picking trip up north so we could see my sister and her family
before the cold made outdoor gatherings impossible. Because my sister and mom
live in a very pretty leaf-ful tourist area, all the nearby hotels were booked
up. So I, with crazy mixed-up hope, asked if we could stay at mom’s
beautiful-but-politically terrifying rural home.
That choice seems INSANE now, given that my mom and
stepdad are anti-maskers and fatness is a Covid-19 co-morbidity, but I really
really wanted to have a normal visit. I didn’t want to admit how bad things had
gotten, between us and in the country. I still kind of don’t. Mom and stepdad
had plans during apple picking so we had a lovely time catching up with the niece
and nephews, banking up hugs for the long winter.
The Sunday morning after apples, a few hours before
Sweetie and I had planned to leave to take the kids on our traditional comic
store and thrift store run, I was sitting at my mom’s dining room table playing
Animal Crossing, collecting up star fragments from the previous night’s meteor
shower. Mom and stepdad started grousing about some neighbors who had balked at
their decision to hold a mask optional-meeting for their local beekeepers club.
(I so hate that my bee siblings have to be roped into this story! No honey for
fascists!)
I focused deeply on my Switch, making noncommittal
noises as they gradually steered the conversation toward me. Mom has a “no
politics rule” at her house but I’ve learned over the years that it’s really a “no
politics unless nobody is looking and I can use world events to torment my
oldest daughter for sport.”
“What do you think about masks?” she asked me “I’ve
been doing my research
(PLEASE SPARE US FROM WHITE LADIES ONLINE DOING THEIR “RESEARCH”)
And I think they’re actually making things worse.”
Important to this story is that Sweetie’s sister, with
whom she is close, had been admitted to the hospital with Covid-19 that
weekend. Interspersed with the virtual island-visiting and apple-y adorableness
were tense hours when Sweetie was waiting for updates from her family text chain
and worrying that her sister might die. I didn’t know how to help except to be
there for her and believe in science. Sweetie’s sister did recover within
weeks, but until that point it was my closest and saddest brush with that
stupid asshole virus.
I didn’t want to tell mom what I thought. I didn’t
want to open the floodgates. But I did.
I want to try and piece together the beginning of
Covid, familywise. Just before the quar hit, I would have said I was close with
my mom and aunts. In February, Sweetie and I spent a day at my late Grandmom’s house,
trying to help sort her stuff, which really just boiled down to mom and aunts
convincing us to take home a bunch of stuff to ease the burden. I took home
many spools of ribbon, a ratty but retro pink towel, trash bags’ worth of silk
flowers for art projects, and a random little business card holder that I now
use every day for my work Zoomings.
Despite Catholicism/conservative politics’ lifelong
irking of my soul, I loved my Grandmom so, so much. I felt united in grief with
my mom’s generation, intensely aware that I might be doing this sorting in my
own mom’s house before too long. That night that we sat around Grandmom’s old
table, Favorite Aunt, Beach Aunt, Mom, Sweetie and me, I felt closer with them
than I ever had before. I don’t always allow myself family attachment easily,
but that night, I was all in. I felt powerfully purposeful and secure, buoyed
by these women who’d shaped me all my life. It wasn’t like I forgot politics,
but love did let me forgive and transcend.
When quarantine came, when I wasn’t taking trauma naps
or crying into Zoom, I shifted mightily into tend-and-befriend mode. I checked
in daily with family members to make sure everyone was okay, sending (I hope) undemanding
good cheer in the form of cats-and-flowers pictures and bird-sightings updates.
The first inkling that they were tapped into the disinformation machine was
subtle, but it heaved me into reality and a lifetime of stored hurt.
My mom was sewing me a gorgeous set of masks, as was
Favorite Aunt. While Favorite Aunt griped along about some nebulous “they” forcing
us to wear the masks, I thought my mom was mostly in sciencetown with me.
But then, in a Messenger thread, I expressed worry
about my mom (68) visiting the post office to mail the masks.
“Oh, I’m not worried,” she said “I have a really
strong immune system, and besides, it’s not like this is the city.”
Pretty innocuous, but to me what she said had the
bitter sting of racism. It reminded me of back in 2016 when she’d told me that “Rural
people are just better with guns than city people are.”
“Sometimes,” I typed as gently as possible, “It comes
across as racist when you say things like that.”
That concern went unresolved as mom pivoted into her
fave form of gaslighting, medical magical thinking that ranges from the
victim-blamey to the Eugenic.
“I think fear is what’s causing the disease. I wish
you weren’t so fearful.”
I wasn’t going through my days in fear, at least I
didn’t think so. I was listening to poetry from far away, I was taking walks, I
was working when I could, I was checking on the neighbors. I was proud of how
well I was taking care of myself and Sweetie in such a horrifying month. But
all my mom could see in me was weakness and cowardice and self-fulfilling
dread. The grief-chasm between who I am and who she thinks I am made me panic
and flail like Wile E. Coyote realizing belatedly that he has just walked off a
cliff.
I know this is off-topic for the Kitten Calendar and I’m
in the middle of some much cuter threads, but I need a place to process this without
any family readers and without asking any activist friends to any extra
emotional labor. So if you’re reading, thanks! I owe you some fun later on?
What do I do with a mother-daughter relationship after
mom has informed me that “Reparations would be horrifying” because reports about
slavery were exaggerated? Fully, teeth-grindingly estranged, is where. I don’t
know what my family life will look like past the protective barriers of Zoom,
guess I’d better figure it out. Let’s try to see how we got here.
There was a day I’ve already written about some, a day
last June when I lost all of my plucky good citizenship and determination. Even
my badass block-a-cop-car protester courage was eluding me. The city was under police
and military siege, there was still a curfew/quarantine combo making me jump
out of my skin, and on top of that a big rainstorm knocked the power out in a
way that seemed (but wasn’t, of course) permanent.
I went to Sweetie’s to use her Wi-fi for work and
ended up breaking down crying because she had neither ground beans nor a scoop
to make coffee. I was out of everything that kept me a decent, functioning
human, like my own power was out. It was a time I could have used a mom who checks
in to see if I’m okay. Sweetie has those kind of parents! Though they are
conservative Texans, they do tend to ask after her safety whenever the National
Guard is in town (So often it seems like!) and never discourage her from
protesting or assume she is a fire-setting looter. They just, you know, parent!
Even though she is fifty and really tough!
I’m 46 and really tough, and my mom spent all of her
energy writing facebook comments about how she “thought I believed in peace” and
defending white people in general and her own white-supremacist-leaning (Well, I
THOUGHT they were just leaning but it seems they are marching with the Proud
Boys tomorrow…) sisters. So many comments until I blocked her, having tried
every strategy for years to bring her around. Sometimes I just want to say,
fuck off, SURJ, I fucking TRIED.
I should have fully blocked her (not just facebook blocked
her) back in March 2020 when she started circulating anti-mask disinfo! Or
maybe way back in 2016 when she told me I was manifesting rape culture by
thinking about it too much. Possibly, I should never have tried to be friends
or “friends” with my mom at all, but I kept trying. I still kind of want to
try, it’s so hard to stop myself. Psychologists tell that story about the
mother who set her son on fire, how he still asked for her.
After I ruined Thanksgiving 2016, (which, sorry niece and
nephews, NEEDED to be ruined) I eventually responded to mom’s efforts to stay
close. (That Christmas, though, I must’ve really given the UPS man a sense of
futility when I took mom’s yearly wreath right down to the curb.) Mom’s love
language for me is jewelry. If a bracelet broke, I sent her the beads for her
jewelry supplies. She repaired all my necklaces for me over the last four
years, both ones she designed and ones she hadn’t. I did a very good job of
extending and reciprocating love. I’m proud of us both.
But my (our) deep wish to be connected was no match
for the powerful pull of the Trump/Russia internet (I can just hear her huffing
in disbelief, Ugh, Russia, like I made up the Mueller Report) and my
conservative aunts, especially as the four of them were still mourning the loss
of my Grandmom from summer 2019.
This is the story of how helpless I felt, how there
was absolutely nothing more I could do, as my mom was swept away. Or maybe she
was always that far away to begin with.
So, just like at the beginning of summer, I was in
waiting-for-letters mode as I settled into my Dad’s apartment in a suburb of
Small Hometown City. His was a quintessential divorced-guy apartment,
rent-to-own cream-colored furniture and nondescript lamps. Where were vertical
blinds on every window. There were pretty pine trees around the front balcony
though! Dad was (and is) a man of
routine and coffee, as I eventually grew up to be. (Coffee always, but the
routine part of my heart took a while.) It was comforting and monotonous there,
great for feeling safe and figuring out what was next.
During the intermittent times I lived with Dad, my bed
was a waterbed, sheeted with mustard-colored cloths from my Grandpa’s restaurant
days. It was heated and welcoming. There was a nice big closet for my not-many
clothes and a yellow landline phone perched on top of a moving box. There was
room on the windowsill for my thrift store tchotchkes.
The immediate challenge as my long-distance
relationship with Perfectly 1993 Guy began was having anything to say in my
letters. The main emotion of my early adulthood was exquisite boredom, still
one of my very favorites. (These days, on the rare occasions when I’m called in
to my college bookstore job, the boss saves the most tedious tasks for me and I’m
grateful!)
But I could put off the letter writing troubles,
because Perfectly 1993 Guy planned a visit almost right away. He and I had
consecutive birthdays, though he was a year younger than me, so we planned for
him to visit me at my Dad’s on the weekend of both birthdays. It was truly one
of the top two most adorable weekends of my young life. It might take me a
while to get my head around it but I’ll do my best to not take a million years.
The Cool Room in Favorite Aunt’s house is still one of
the most comforting rooms in the many-roomed house of my heart. It was where
the air conditioning lived in that sweltering, old-fashioned house. It was perfectly
Eighties and all the way comforting, wood-paneled walls, small, curtained
windows, deep-turquoise-blue couch with some kind of white print, maybe
flowers. Pleasantly cavelike, with a glass pocket-door that maybe we slid shut.
It was where the TV lived, and where The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow and I
somehow found ourselves alone. (I still
don’t quite understand how that happened, can’t decide if it was kind of
Favorite Aunt to leave us alone or if it was weird creepy matchmaking—it’s
occurring to me that I never experienced non-sneaky, non-naked kids-being-attracted-to-each-other
situations so I really have no idea how it’s supposed to go.)
How it went was, chaste, beatific, awkward, sweet. I
lay snuggled in his arms for long, quiet stretches of time.
Until him, I had only been kissed by selfish,
careless, insistent (and, by 2019 standards, sometimes pretty rapey) men and
boys, so there is a very good chance that I was a terrible kisser.
My new friend may have had less experience at kissing
than I did, but I think he had much more experience treating others like human
beings. If my kisses were terrible, hungry, aggressive things, he took it in
stride. I can hope that he eventually mellowed me to a more loving and
thoughtful pace. Or maybe we were just teenagers doing our best.
After what seemed like hours of making out but
probably wasn’t, he said “No thank you” and backed his face away. That hurt and
felt like a mystery, but I think (I hope) I just put my head on his heart and
gave it a rest. There were eventually more snuggles and more kisses, but I’ve
always wondered if I or society or Favorite Aunt or all three of those things
pressured him into continuing to kiss me. I didn’t think about any of that at
the time. My heart was floating and selfish and somehow also generous with joy.
I was a blooming little flower of love.
I forget where we were going or coming home from, but
I have a powerful image of laying in his lap in the backseat of Favorite Aunt’s
van, in another highway sunset. Pink sky, low-flying airport planes, lots of
toll booths. I gazed up at his face feeling both blissful and disjointed—was this
the face I would love forever? The answer, as with most faces I’ve been that
close to, is both absolutely yes and not at all.
Unable to stop taking their unease with the Big Trauma
out on me and on each other, my parents, near divorce and overflowing with
violence, sent me to stay with my Favorite Aunt at her beautiful Colonial-era
home, about six hours away from my immediate family’s cramped and feral
suburban home. Favorite Aunt had always been the person who most vocally liked
me when my parents, clearly and emphatically, did not. She was an oasis of hugs, praise, and affection, in a
childhood full of coldness, contempt, and turning to teachers as my only daily
source of grownup approval.
She was also, though, Catholic. That part of the story
makes it hard to not become incoherent with rage. Favorite Aunt’s spirtuality
felt like a bright white escape hatch, a way to clean and simplify myself of
such a dirty and complicated life, a way to escape the pain, trauma, abandonment
and fear of the previous months. Of course now I understand that in being pulled
(temporarily, I’m relieved to say) back into the religion of my upbringing I
was both victim of and complicit in a more effective and insidious factory of
rape than any teen party, no matter how out of control, could ever be.
At the time though, it seemed that the best way to
regain control after a brutal rape and subsequent assault by my dad (https://kittencalendar.blogspot.com/2018/10/metoo-letter-dear-dad-stfu-about.html)
was
to blame myself, my sluttiness, my sense of adventure. That seems heartbreaking
now, but at the time it felt self-explanatory. Such is the power of an adult
willing to dole out affection. I don’t think my Favorite Aunt was
rape-culture-gaslighting me on purpose, because at the time, blaming myself seemed
as natural and as life-giving as air.
Favorite Aunt’s charisma and generosity of affection
means she often has children as friends. (I share this quality, for which I am
very grateful.) She thought one of these friends, the artsy, quiet son of one
of her church families, would be a perfect match for me, and he was. (All these
years later, she still ships us, in spite of a lifetime mostly apart and a mountain
of evidence. This doesn’t bother me as much as maybe it should.)
I don’t remember how he and I got together, whether we
were pushed or drawn, probably both. I can’t clearly remember my first kiss
with The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow (also, the first truly kind or loving kiss I’d
known) but I know it was postcard perfect. Favorite Aunt and I went to visit
him and his family where they were camping for a week, on a vacation island not
too far ways from Favorite Aunt’s home. We walked (maybe I was holding his
hand, seems like something I would do…) down the beach a little ways away from
the families. We stood beside the water, the tall waves making for the closest
approximation of privacy we were likely to get.
I remember the sea as rough but kind that day, the
dizzy feeling in my throat, the sense of finality, of accomplishment. Having a
sexy feeling that was also loving, with anyone besides myself, was a new and
blissful sensation, as big and reliable and all-encompassing as the ocean itself.
The day went by fast. Favorite Aunt and I had made
homemade poptarts for him and his family (how Emily Gilmore of us!) and we gave
the container to him out the car window as Favorite Aunt prepared to drive us
away. He kissed me on the forehead and said, not unkindly, “You have really big
dandruff.”
All of the beach days and other excursions with
Favorite Aunt meant that my scalp was sunburned and peeling. I was only a
little bit embarrassed. I was a jumble of salt and skin and hot-pink feeling,
riding away from the beach and towards a sunset as pink as my cheeks.
I’m
going to need you to stop complaining to me about Kirsten Gillibrand. While I
obviously agree with you about global warming being an important issue, your repetitive
complaints which only target female politicians, echo your 2016 “I go easy on
you about Hillary” comment. All these comments sound, at best, like low-key
sexism and at worst, like a gentle continuation of a lifetime pattern of abuse,
both on a national and personal scale.
When you
tell me, over and over, that the senator who is most vocally in support of the
#metoo movement isn’t doing a good enough job (For YOU. After one donation and
one survey response. Are you KIDDING ME WITH THIS!? I know you see how much
work I do very day, why do you feel so entitled not to? And WORSE why do you
expect ME to do your work FOR you? I pour countless hours into justice work and
I have my own senators to nag!)
ANYWAY,
when you complain about Senator Gillibrand, you are also dismissing the work
that I do, both personally and politically, Every. Single. Day. You are
dismissing the power and courage of not just me but of every single rape
survivor who perseveres although life feels like a constant attack on our
bodies. When the sea levels rise, do you imagine we will somehow be LESS
vulnerable? Less raped? Do you imagine WE are somehow the ones endangering the
planet, by rising up and insisting that---GASP---we be treated as humans?
But
there are a couple of more insidious reasons you should not be low-key trolling
me by running down female leaders, particularly Gillibrand.
When
I was in third or fourth grade, I overheard you at least try to rape Mom. You’d
both been fighting about sex for weeks and I was WAY too up to date about what
was going on in there. I heard Mom scream “No! Don’t! (his name!) Stop! Stop!” and it
scared the shit out of me. I started to cry really loud and she said “See? Now
you made (me) cry.” And then things seemed to calm down in your room. I don’t
know how I understood what was going on, but I did.
After
that, the world changed for me. I became darker, less hopeful. Though Mom
denied it to me when I asked a few years later, I know what I heard. You took
something profound away from me that night—my trust for the world, my trust for
love. I’ve been fighting like hell ever since to get those things back. (Senator
Gillibrand?! Also fighting for those things.)
Fast
forward a few years to when I was drugged, raped, and beaten at a party. A few
days later, you beat the shit out of me too—just pounding and pounding away and
saying “You brought this into our house! You did this!” Meaning, I guess, that
that I’d somehow made you and Mom violent by getting raped, even though you’d
been that way my whole life.
That
night my friend Bethanne came and got me and I stayed with her family for the
night, but I had never felt so deeply and horribly alone. Over the years, that feeling
of abandonment and betrayal has come back to me over and over, causing me more
panic than any of the original violence. “You are alone, the panic tells me,
and the people who say they love you are only waiting to attack and blame you.”
You taught my panic how to speak.
And
yet, here I am with the optimism you keep trying to undermine. I did not get
this way by accident. It has taken me HUNDREDS of hours of therapy, writing,
self-care, activism, and many other kinds of work. I am optimistic and
productive by both sheer force of self-creation and as a tribute to the people
who have helped me build, thread by thread, vote by vote, scream by scream, the
person I am today.
And not
only can you not write ONE GODDAMNED LETTER to Congress, but you have the
callousness, cruelty, and entitlement to give me a hard time about how YOUR
SENATOR CARES TOO MUCH ABOUT WOMEN’S RIGHTS? PLEASE.
I
have loved you and done my best to forgive you for all of these years without
asking you for anything in return. Now I’m asking for two things:
1.Acknowledge
that you got this letter.
2.Stop
retraumatizing me and trying to put me in my place by running down female politicians.
I am not going to give up the fight to own our own
bodies. We are not going back and there is nothing you can do about it. If you
EVER crap on Senator Gillibrand or any other female leader to me again I can’t
promise I won’t FLIP THE FUCK OUT. And NO ONE will get an apology letter.
I’m on vacation this week
from the library and it’s given me enough space from Mr. Makout Music to really
think through what our flirtship means/meant. Of course, there’s the simplest
meaning, that it was a sweet attraction that didn’t work out and is now
awkwardly in the process of becoming whatever’s next. The meaning we share is
straightforward, kind, and a little sad, but my own side of things feels more
complicated.
It’s hard in times like
this to not get annoyed at my heart, at my romantic imagination, even at the
sex drive I worked so hard (and only somewhat successfully) to embrace. It’s
hard not to feel like we lost parts of what was nice between us because I just had to try and make things progress, but
maybe things just progressed on their own, the way things tend to do.
A few months ago when he
first suggested a too-emo-for-the-library-playlist song, I really did try not
to let the song’s feelings run away with me. When he suggested I look up The
Internet while I was doing my data entry in the basement at work, I ended up so
swoony/squishy that I could barely walk up the stairs to my department. I
thought I should probably try to stem the tide of feelings sweeping in with the
lyrics, and I did try not to think he was telling me something with the songs.
I know what music does to me, how it accelerates the heart’s processes and
wakes up not-wholly-earned devotion. But sometimes, I just have to let it.
He told me once that he
likes romantic music because he has a hard time expressing his feelings, that
songs help him do so. He looked in my eyes when he said it, and after that I
let the music take me where it wanted me to go, where I wanted to go, where it
turns out I’d really missed going.
Still, I tried to be so careful
this time. I asked and re-asked what he meant by things. I asked for as much
definition as I reasonably could. I asked if the attraction was mutual before
we were ever alone together, and he said it was. I hope it really was, that he
didn’t just say it to be kind or to please me. I’ve found the best way is to
take him at face value, to just try and straightforwardly believe what he’s
told me. It’s hard.
My peer counselor at the
local LGBT center has urged me through all of this to focus on facts, to
concentrate on What Is. By that measure, he’s showed me hours of care and
affection, given me so much without expecting anything in return. I appreciate
the vulnerability it might take for a shy guy to come find me almost every day,
to share some of his deepest stuff at work, in front of the kids and everybody.
He said to me once “I want to hear all of your stuff and I want to tell you all
of mine.” What a sweet, open thing to say, and I so much hope it might be true
again after the awkward simmers down.
Yet in spite of What Is,
I struggle not to see myself as somehow coercive, as an ugly, fat someone who
was romantically deluded to think that someone like him could be attracted to
me. My mind is so ashamed of the Stupid Delusional Crush Girl story that I
superimpose it over every situation, though there are of course different
reasons behind every connection and not-connection.
If I hadn’t been fighting
the story so hard, would I have been in such a hurry? Would I have given him
more space to make the first move and therefore be more comfortable, less
pressured, more free? Maybe, but the problem with that line of reasoning is
that it’s always going to be sexist to feel bad about being too forward, not
just sexist but also counterproductive and counter to the only person I can
manage to be—my barreling-forward, enthusiastic, soaking-wet-underpants self.
I know that the man for
me is probably bolder, more available, probably more experienced by a lot, but
right now I don’t want some stranger. This is the begrudgingly-go-back-on-OK
Cupid phase of getting over someone, resenting them all for not being him, even
though I know the next guy will feel equally best and equally-only when I’m
with him, just by the virtue and magic of attraction. I know that when the next
ones come along, the tide will come in and things will shift into place just as
easily and emphatically, because bodies and hearts know what they’re doing.
They’ll take us where we need to go.
Like most of America, I
had a very hard Thanksgiving. Things aren’t good between my mom and me, and I
was unable to keep great gusts of election rage from screeching out as pie was
being served. As I drove home in the middle of the night blasting Arcade Fire
and Frank Ocean, I couldn’t wait to be back safely in my city, in my apartment.
I’m thankful that I’m amazing at rage driving.
My life is entering a new
phase now and it feels both lonely and spiderweb-strongly connected. Friday
night phonebanks at the feminist bookstore three doors down, marches as often
as I want to go, a community art show to make a sanctuary for anyone made
afraid by the election results—these things are home, who I really am, and I
want to leave my tragically Trumpified family members behind long enough to
settle back into who I really am.
I know that I’ve partly
been focused on Mr. Makeout Music because crush-sadness is easier to deal with
than election sadness, but the best thing I can do for both sadnesses is to
take care, to find a way to appreciate myself as I really am. In that self,
there’s anger and loss and a divorce I haven’t yet managed to finish. There are
unsettled hurts on both a national and a personal scale. There’s an ocean of
rage and an ocean of joy.
But
there’s also this simple and sheepish-making fact. I love Mr. Makeout Music.
And I also love his “no.” I want to be as close to him as I can but also
respect What Is, his real life and my own. I want to step back and let him be
where he is, respect and support his goals, be someone accepting and
unconditional. I want to let myself move on and find the enthusiastic, mutual,
available love that I really do know I deserve, but I haven’t yet let go of the
thread between us, of those suddenly-deep conversations, of the safe space his
presence made for me right here in the middle of pussy-grabbing America.
It is
a hard time to be (STILL) trying to learn to connect with men. Part of the
reason that I get so attached is that deep down I really, REALLY miss them. As
independent and strong and spinsteriffic as I am/want to be, it feels like part
of me is missing. I am happier with a man to love, and I really hope I get to
feel what it’s like for a man to love me back someday. The joy I felt when he
and I were so near to being a thing, it was beautiful, a breeze of relief in my
heart, that magical unlatching that happens sometimes, that seduces me so. It
was wholeness, it was being myself. Even as I try my best to let him go, I want
to believe in that joy, to feel like I deserve it, to take the light with me
even as I walk away. It might take more bravery than I have, but I’ll try it.
As I’ve written here before, my conception was an
accident, while my parents were still in college. Her family’s Catholic faith
mean that she had no option of abortion. She was coerced by her family into
marriage at the age of twenty. Throughout my childhood, in the worst of times,
she told me that her marriage, which included both verbal and physical abuse and
marital rape, was my fault. Because I was a child when I heard that accusation,
I had little choice but to believe it, and even after decades of hard inner
work, a tiny fragment of my heart believes it still.
Though it’s the central pain of my existence, that
dual sense of unwelcome and responsibility is also a huge gift. It fuels my
drive to make the space around me safe for those who have less power and to
push back against coercion and sexist norms whenever I can. My background
compels me to do whatever little bit I can so that someday women won’t be
forced by religion, family pressure, or tradition to give up control of their
own bodies.
For large swaths of my life, I’ve simply hated my
mother, almost thought of her as a monster. (My dad, of course, deserves as
many paragraphs, and he’s had them.) She and I have spent four painful decades
trying to make friends with each other, and to both of our credit, we now enjoy
an uneasy peace. But I never truly empathized with twenty-year-old her until
the pope’s visit to the U.S. unlocked a treasure trove of anti-Catholic fury in
my heart.
It wasn’t right for my mom to take her anger out on
me, but she was absolutely right and justified in being angry. In that forced
decision, her autonomy was taken away, and only now, as I’m learning to relish
my own autonomy, can I begin to fathom that loss. She lived, we all lived, in a
tyranny in which chaos and violence could rain down at any moment if, for
example, she hadn’t washed, matched, and put away the correct pair of brown
socks. What’s more, she thought that she deserved the abuse, because
Catholicism and sexism had taught her that she was less than he was, period.
Even long-divorced, she told me that she should have
just shut up and obeyed him better, that that would have kept us safe.
But what about existing, you ask? I really love
existing, and I wouldn’t trade my family for another in a million years. But
what if, in that momentous moment, she’d felt empowered to choose? I think she
might have still had me, but if I hadn’t been the product of coercion, she and
I may at least have had less of a struggle to make a relationship. I do hold
both of us accountable for our own actions, but what would it have been like to
grow up in a world where my mother’s body was her own?
I’m sure that some little-kid part of me thinks that
by advocating for choice, I can go back in time and repair that essential
wound, but I can’t. What I can do is hope to give other mothers a better chance
at deciding their own lives, and give more children the chance to be genuinely
loved and wanted.
Electing Hillary Clinton send a clear message against
misogyny and oppressive gender norms, and she is also the Democrat who is most
vocal in her support of Planned Parenthood and women’s (AKA everyone’s) health.
I am voting my mom’s life, for my own, and for children of all genders, that
they may be wanted, loved, chosen, and safe.
Last month, I made the painful decision to leave the
Unitarian church that has been my spiritual home for seven years. It was over a
philosophical difference that really snuck up on me, a lightning-strike
realization that we (the church and I) weren’t on the same page. I try to see
it the way it’s best to see dating deal-breakers, that saying no to what doesn’t
work makes room for what does, but leaving was a huge loss. I’m struggling with
a mix of shame, disappointment, and sadness that is very familiar to be because
I seem to hit a wall of it at least every few years.
1. A community can’t be a correction for a hurtful family.
Just the way I’ve sometimes gone to doms for approval, I go to communities
hoping that they can love me into realness, approve me into existence. There’s
an underlying hope of “Now that I’ve
found/become/befriended ___________, I will finally be okay, will finally be
welcomed into the world and find unconditional love. It’s sad to realize that I
didn’t have that with my original family as a child, but I can’t expect healing
and wholeness to come from anywhere but within.
2. A community can’t replace my own family, flawed though
they may be. I live too far away from my family of origin and I don’t have a
family to share a household with right now, and that leaves a hole that nothing
can fill.
3. A community can’t fix rape culture, because rape culture
is in all of us. It is always easier for groups to be angry at the person
pointing out the problem than to face the problem itself. I’ll always have to
speak up against it, but I’d love to learn to feel safe doing so.
4. A community can’t erase heartbreak. I’ve realized that,
though there were other factors, I left the BDSM scene because I couldn’t
process the rejections I’d experienced there. I tried to patch each loss with
another person, (and the whole thing was an attempt to patch divorce grief) but
the grief kept walking me down the same path. After three years, I’m to the
point where I can see the loss for what it is, and I desperately want to stop
sponging that pain onto other people. It’s hard not to try and numb the loss of
Sweetie and the life we created together.
5. A community can’t stay the same forever, and it can’t
change as I change. Just the way that, in dating, I have to walk away from a
bad match instead of trying to torture the person into changing for you, I have
to let go of situations that aren’t a good fit. It doesn’t mean that I have to
fear or fight forever, just that I need to constantly let things come and go.
6. A community can’t replace love. I am sick of being
single, but I still have some inner work (and a whole lot of book-editing!) to
do before I’m ready to start a life with another person, but I have to look
loneliness in the eye, to honor it. I have to realize how much I want my own
family and stop trying to shoehorn other things into that space.
7. A community can’t come to my rescue. If I ignore my
instincts and walk into something that doesn’t work, no principal, no dom, no
friend can be expected to “save” me. I am a grown woman, and I want to train
myself to hear and respect my inner voice so that I can stop reliving
abandonment or having childlike expectations of “loyalty.” We’re all adults
being ourselves, and it’s up to me to find out what actually works, and do it.
8. A community can’t define me, erase me, or absorb me. It
can’t give me an identity, and any identity it DOES give will feel
constraining. The only thing I know I am is me,
and I have to find out a way to be solid within myself, so I can stop expecting
others to create me.
This has been a harsh, lonely time. The double loss of J.
and the church has made for a very sad couple of months. It’s hard to have
faith in anything right now, so I’m just trying little things as they come
along, letting joy and connection in whatever little windows they can find. I’m
also still trying to find help with the walls and wounds I keep running into. I
don’t like being back in this Groundhog’s
Day of sadness, this most vexing part of the labyrinth, but I’m doing my
best to learn as much as I can while I’m here.
Between my condom struggle with J, newly-admitted motherhood
wishes, #StandWithPP, and Catholicism smothering the infrastructure of major
cities the way it sometime smothers the infrastructure of my heart, I realized
this little almost-a-character from my teen years needed some love. My teen
pregnancy-scare story sheds a strangely warm light on my current adventures.
It was the year after the Bad Thing happened. I’d stopped
being quite as slutty as I had been and purported to only have sex for love.
Sometime in that week of shenanigans, Best Friend decided to introduce me to
Dave. He was in a Misfits cover band, or maybe it was Danzig. It was the
Nineties. She called him up, passed me the phone, and within ten minutes, he
was telling me that he loved me, which I (think I) knew was insane, but the
words had their desired affect. (I would repeat this mistake and lose a Twitter
handle making the same mistake as an adult. *sheepish.*)
He was a teen version Bill, stocky and handsome, dark-haired
and snarly. On the first day, we had angry, vocal sex with the windows open.
Sometimes, when I was having sex back then, it was a simple “Fuck you.” to the
world. Sometimes it still is.
The next day, after the sex, we went for a walk in the
cemetery, the Catholic one that had all of the angel statuary and was therefore
my favorite place to pose people moodily in front of for black and white
photos. We took the bus to the mall and bought a tape, The Dead Milkmen’s Bucky Fellini.
But on the third day, it was off. He treated me like I was
ugly and big, he called me by my first grade nickname, which had the word
“barbarian” in it. I couldn’t make him see me or want me, and after that day,
he was gone.
I desperately wanted him to be not gone. I looked for his
parents’ pickup truck (a red one with one of those cover things on the back
with windows) in every parking lot, hoping that I would run into Dave
somewhere, that he would recognize me.
In a few weeks, I noticed that my period was late. (I
haven’t always been the princess of safer sex that I am now, and I’m very
grateful that the consequences were not worse.) Best Friend and I went down to
the Birthright, the prolife clinic downtown, next to the little bakery where we
sometimes got cinnamon donuts before school. It felt like a very grown up and
important errand to be on.
I peed on a stick but never saw the stick. The nice
Birthright lady, who in my memory is dressed all in pastels like a doll, just
gave me the result: positive.
And I, almost-seventeen and pretty utterly lost in life,
didn’t feel even a little bit of fear. Here’s what I felt: joy. The pressure of
having my life ahead of me whooshed away and I knew what to do. Of course there
was the silly teenage idea that I had made (literally made) a friend for life,
someone who would love me and never leave, but there was also a real sense of
calm and purpose. I didn’t have to worry what I was for anymore, because I only
had to take care of this baby. I named her immediately: Daisy.
It’s seems bonkers now to think that no follow-up doctors
appointments were made right away. There was no
wait-until-third-trimester-to-tell-people rule back then either, I guess,
because after I told my mom, she let me call up the aunts and tell them too. An
amazing thing happened: For the first time in my short life, I felt valued and
accepted. My mom was 100% on my side, and the wall of hatred that had lived
between us for years temporarily came down. No one judged me or said I was bad,
they just asked how they could help. My beach aunt gave me my (then) littlest
cousin’s car seat.
That all of that happened without me even had a doctors
appointment was complete madness, so I can be forgiven for calling the
ambulance when my period came. (It warms my heart to think that my mom, who
yelled at me for every single other thing, never gave me a hard time about that
ambulance bill.) I called Dave, who had never picked up a phone after our third
and last day together) from the hospital waiting room, grateful, if I’m honest,
to have an excuse to call him, and left a message.
I wanted them to tell me it was okay, that I could still
have Daisy, but what the doctors said was that the blood test proved that I had
never been pregnant at all. There had either been a false positive or the lady
at Birthright had tricked me as some kind of abstinence lesson. I always
assumed it was the latter, but I just Googled the organization and it seems
pretty not-evil, so most likely, it was an honest mistake. My main
advice-giving aunt said to tell people I’d lost the baby, since technically
that was true even though I’d only lost the idea
of her. I do still love and miss her, even though she turned out to have been
an imaginary friend.
That was twenty-five years ago and the closest I’ve ever
come to pregnancy. The situation makes really no sense, but I have to take
seriously the way motherhood settled over me like a magic blanket of hope and
purpose. Though it’s unfair that only motherhood could unlock my family that
way, I can still feel that time as an oasis of acceptance and love in those
ugly and violent years.
I want to acknowledge that even as I rail against the
coercions and injustices that come from the patriarchy, from the institution of motherhood, the actual
spiritual fact of motherhood is in me. I felt it in those few teenage weeks, a
white light lantern in my soul that I knew would guide me through it, to shiny
and wonderful parts of myself. It wasn’t
really loss or fear that made me bury that light. It was just life and other
projects. But it sure was a lovely little light, and even if I’m not blessed
with a miracle baby or stepchildren, I would love to look for big and little
ways to shine it.
After dinner, we took a walk in the woods, during which we
fell into several more conversational rabbit holes of incompatibility. The
first draft listed them, but it felt nitpicky and boring. I don’t want to be
any more like his million-paragraph blog post about the girl at Coldstone
Creamery who accidentally put nuts in his sundae than I already am. Plus, the
shaky conversations didn’t stop us from falling back into bed, where the real
crux of things happened.
J, in times when he could get beyond his self-doubt, felt
like a present and thorough lover. It’s hard to discard the times when he took
my hand and placed it on his heart afterwards, and there were times when I
certainly (thought I) felt our whole beings being celebrated, where pleasure
ran the show and overcame everything. But he also needed an incredible amount
of praise, and that’s coming from me. Even when I was smiling and wailing and
near-crying with pleasure, he constantly made this “Mmmm?” sound that I figured
out meant “Am I doing a good job?” which I thought was already apparent. As I
rolled though orgasm after, he asked over and over for confirmation that I’d
arrived. He chimed on the phrase “my partner’s pleasure” to an almost Rain Man
degree, but after a while it could feel like I wasn’t a partner at all, but a
flushed and naked approval machine, a sweaty mirror. It was a
kind-of-terrifying glimpse into what it must be like to fuck, well, myself.
Anyway, so after our walk we were back in bed, snuggling and
making out and trying a few new things. He sat on top of me and put his dick
between my happy boobs, played with my nipples, and, intermittently, my clit.
I’d told him I like having guys come on my chest, and I loved having him up
there, pinning me down, doing this good-kind-of-humiliating thing. I liked
looking up at him the most, at his soft brown animal eyes, and I liked his hard
dick in my hands and thrusting against me. He didn’t come, but I didn’t really
think about that, just moved on to the next cuddly position, stroking him
lazily while he petted my arm and kissed my forehead.
But then his entire energy just…froze. He got up to go
downstairs a second, and when he came back up, he was almost like a ghost. He
lay down rigidly next to me on the outside of the bed and said, in an impatient
voice, “I feel like I’m doing you a disservice by not letting you do blow
jobs.”
“What? No. I told you, I only want to do things that you
feel enthusiastic about.”
“But you were disappointed that I didn’t come on you. I have
trouble coming sometimes and (ex-wife) used to get mad about it.”
“But we were just playing. I thought we were just having fun
together.” I’d known he was obsessed with my orgasms, but it hadn’t occurred to
me that he was worried about his own.
“It’s just, I can’t do my favorite thing.” Meaning, in case
you forgot FOR LIKE A SECOND, sex without a condom.
I just started to cry. “I was having so much fun, and you
feel so good to me. I thought we were in this together, but somehow it’s not
enough for you. We’re not on the same page.” I knew in that moment that just as
he blamed his ex for their entire failed marriage, he’d ask me to shoulder the
blame for anything that went wrong between is. It was what I predicted would
happen when he went off on her after our flower date. I was that girl who
couldn’t do anything right.
I felt so sad and hurt and little. I wish I could say I told
him to put his pants on right then and go, but there were four torturous hours
after that, trying to talk and fuck ourselves back into a connection. (Still
with a condom, of course.) Though they were sad hours, I’m glad we tried
everything, and I’m glad that we were the kind of honest you can be with
someone who is no longer a prospect. When he told me he never wanted to get
married again, I told him I could only be in a relationship that had hope. I
admitted how lucky he was to have already had his children, how difficult and
sad it can be to long for a family at this age.
Just before we finally admitted that he had to go, he lay
there on the bed and sang the most awful Harry
Chapin song (Pause to Google Harry Chapin and see if he’s still alive so that I
might hope to someday punch him in the face…drat.) about a broken barfly and a
fat, ugly waitress who decide to make their empty, broken lives better by
settling for each other. I am both fascinated and livid that this is a thing
that happened to me, but it really helped me to understand that he and I lived
in such different worlds.
When I met him, my life was anything but empty—it was full
(it is full) of poetry and friends and flowers and art. That’s more and more what
it looks like, the further away from the bitterness and grief of divorce that I
get, and I can hope that he’ll end up someday in a similarly more lavish
landscape.
To him, sex narrowed down to such a tiny seconds-long
pinpoint of pleasure, and it made me feel so grateful for all of the confident
and generous lovers and players who showed up at my face with condoms and lube
and gloves and everything they needed to help keep us safe, who took their
penises’ ups and downs with adult aplomb and fucked my whole body with their
whole bodies. I remembered Mr. Sweetheart, who tried to be my first anal at ten
minutes to midnight at Nude Years Eve, couldn’t, and then spent the evening
dancing and fucking and cuddling like the best and happiest of souls.
While lately I’d been dismissing this project as a source of
pain and loss, that night as I tossed and turned and mourned J’s departure, I
was filled with a bright, golden love for all of the characters who came to me
with such generosity, care, and abandon. I knew I could no longer try to
divorce myself from all I’ve learned, that painful as they sometimes were, my
adventures made me strong and part of the world in a way that’s important to
share.
I was proud, too, that I’d been willing to give him
everything, to put on the special underpants and trust despite my misgivings
and fear. Because I was having these epiphanies on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, I
got curious about the holiday and in my cursory research, I read somewhere that
this is a time when god is particularly accessible. I had the crazypants
thought that the way I was feeling, with the special underpants and the flowers
by the door and him still finding fault, might be the way a benevolent creator
would feel sometimes about all humans. Not that I’m saying that I in particular
AM god (though Spinoza sais there’s nothing that isn’t) (also I think everybody
is) but that it might be helpful to look for the ways in which the universe
welcomes us, lavishes us with gifts, the ways in which god is always wearing
the special underpants for us. (It should be noted, also, that J. wore special
underpants that night for me, too—they were silver boxers and I’m sorry I left
then out of the story so far.)
So that’s how a guy with an upsetting fetish for not wearing
condoms made me want to take down the deeper barriers that separate me from
god, and myself, and others. It doesn’t make the heartbreak any less, but I
could not be more grateful.
On the night after the long date, I slept a deep, sad sleep
and dreamed that I was on the island from
Lost, but there was a huge old city at the center of the island with lots of
art to explore. I went into the biggest museum chamber and found the shadow of
a statue of Perseus. This seemed especially important since our flower date was
during the Perseid meteor showers, which were also a part of my shared
traditions with Sweetie. I decided it meant that it was time, past time,
really, for me to slay my own monsters.
After I wrote out that dream and its various implications
that Monday morning, I found myself deeply grateful to J and wanting to, if
possible, leave behind the fears that were getting in the way of enjoying this
messy, complicated, beautiful man and the fun we had to offer each other. So I
did the most me thing possible: I sent him a thank-you note, for my early birthday
dinner and all of the ways he made me feel good. That day as I went about my
bookstore routines and filled in Sweetie (not in too much detail) on the
weekend’s events, a little flower of happiness bloomed in my nether regions and
in my heart. I decided it was okay to just go ahead and like him.
The next day, I got something in the mail back, an early
birthday present he’d clearly sent the second he had my address: a blue canary
night light for the birdhouse in my soul, for the song we’d sung together in
the garden that night. I hadn’t had such a romantic gesture from a man in the
past two decades, if ever. I shrieked and danced around and nearly swooned from
touched-ness. I put on Flood and belted
out the whole thing and got caught up on the dishes, even fantasized about him
maybe wanting to be the only bee in his bonnet. I decided right then and there
to let go of all the things that stop me from not being an Argonaut-murdering
lighthouse. The little bird was too bright to sleep with him on (I was having
horny insomnia and bad headaches.) but I kept him by my bedside.
After a day or so I simmered down and realized that although
it really was a lovely present, I couldn’t be sure about what it meant. J. was
having a vacation week with the kids and therefore (?) wasn’t as frequently in
touch and I started to feel vulnerable, to wonder if maybe I’d been letting my
imagination run away with me too much.
The following weekend was our nondate weekend (apparently he
was unaware of the concept of babysitters) but I was craving closeness so I
proposed that we sext that Friday night. He was hemming and hawing, leaving it
up in the air and being not sure if he had time, and my heart fell. I braved up
and said: “I’m not an afterthought, not someone to be fit in to the margins of
your life.” I admitted that what I was really after was connection, rather than
just sex(t). I am so proud of myself for saying that, and I think that
admission alone proves that I’ve come a long way since being Steampunk Guy’s
“Thing that Happens Sometimes,” his number ten or eleven or whatever I was. Go
me for miles and miles of progress.
I asked for a call instead of sexting and that’s what we
did—as soon as he got the kids to bed, he called and I knew I had to say all of
the things. I told him I didn’t have time to like someone who didn’t like me
back, and he assured me that he did. He told me he couldn’t believe that
someone as perfect for him existed and if he had, he would have gotten up the
courage to divorce sooner. Right now, that sounds like me being rebound girl,
but at the time, it convinced me that we were on the same page, that this
really was a thing. It’s hard to go back through this story and think that he
didn’t like me back; I may have to accept that he did.
That phone call was WONDERFUL, I loved it so much. We stayed
up talking about all different things, about his kids and their adventures that
week, about my birthday plans (He’d convinced me to invite my church friends to
do a birthday brunch, even though I’d been shy to ask since I’d missed the
regular brunch the week before. He did push me to do some very good things.)
all the things we might hope to do together. I gently told him that babysitters
should maybe be a thing, and he said he did want to see me more often and would
look for ways. He offered phone sex near the end but I liked the just talking
so much that I said no. Just like I used to do during long-distance snuggles
with Mr. Sweetheart, I doodled the whole time we were talking and sent him the
drawing afterward.
And I felt brazen enough to send my favorite emoji
Which he diplomatically ignored.
We did sext on my birthday night (after Sweetie had gone home from having cake,
Chinese food, and Bob’s Burgers
episodes) and it was a really good one. He was an excellent sexter, I’m sure
that his erotic novels have their merit! It ended romantically, with us writing
about listening to each other’s heartbeats.
“Is my heart doing a better job of telling you how I feel
than I can?” He asked, and I still don’t know what that meant, but I know that
I liked it. It just turned my insides to mush—I
was officially bonkers about him.
Monday, when I was at the beach saying goodbye to summer
with my cousins and aunts, he sent me a picture of the boys, on a picnic by a
pond. What family-oriented girl could stay cool with something as adorable as
that in her phone? I’m only human.
On the Tuesday after my birthday, in the interest of slaying
my own monsters, I met with a potential new therapist. When I finished the Big
Therapy Project, a lot was left undone. there was another memory that needed
attention, a trickier, more childlike version of me who needed some love. I put
off working on that for all kinds of reasons, mostly being too tired from
teaching to think of anything else. Eventually, though she stuck around long
enough to help me quit the school district, my old therapist moved away and
sent me a list of referrals that sat in my inbox for four months, until J.
became the incentive/trigger that made me realize I needed help. If it works,
I’ll be forever grateful to him. Probably I’ll be forever grateful to him
anyway.
The therapist’s office building was next to a Tiffany’s and
across the street from a pastry shop, which I considered to be a very good
sign. I liked her immediately and she gave me a lot of hope for healing. We
both are people who like to geek out on happiness and wellness, and the
bossiness of her seemed like it could propel me off the Lost island, when I was done exploring, of course. The best part,
though, was that instead of wanting to go home and crawl into bed after
therapy, I wanted to go jump in the pool and make out in the sunshine with J. I
knew he was still off from work so I called and asked, and he said yes, with
the caution that I‘d have to be gone before the kids got home from school.
That afternoon, though so short that we had to set a timer,
was absolutely magical.The sun was hot and bright and the sky
was blue and we played in the pool like kids, like people who had no baggage,
no fear. He kept swimming under me, lifting me up, and kissing me, and I felt
so happy and peaceful and swoony and whole
in his arms. He looked so handsome, healthy, and virile in the sun, and I felt
like a goddess. I pushed him to the edge of the pool, grabbed the wall, and
pinned him there in the most delicious, picture-postcard of a kiss. Right then,
those bodies were in love, I don’t see a way around it.
When it was time to go, it almost seemed like he wanted me
to accidentally meet the kids. His older son had recently stated unequivocally
that he didn’t want J. dating, but J. was slowly trying to warm him up to the
idea, an effort I found encouraging. When it had somehow gotten to be ten after
three, I ran out to my car and was getting in quick but he insisted on saying a
proper kissy goodbye. It felt like he was proud of me, like he wanted to rip
the band-aid off and make me part of his life, and though it was certainly too
soon for that, I took it to heart.
Writing that afternoon makes it so difficult to not to call
him, to try and find a way. I know there isn’t a way, but still. The sunny
optimism of that hour and a half in the pool, the unabashed connection, was
real and I just love it so much.
