Home

After writing about forging ahead with my own identity, I am sitting down to write about a merging of lives. Sort of, anyway.

As a society, we have ways of doing things that have been carved into our way of living by generations before us doing it. So, we are supposed to have some wild university life, meet a partner, get married, buy a shoddy first home, have a baby, move onto nicer second home, send kids out into the world, and retire to Mangawhai.

Even at the beginning, I didn't quite manage to follow the script. Well, I started to. Right up to 'buy a shoddy first home.' Then it all kind of collapsed, and that part of the script was scrawled out.

Now I've thrown the script out, I can focus on what matters to me and not what matters according to the rule books. I know that in the 21st century, the 'rules' are somewhat looser, but I think their foundations are still there.

I can focus on how I feel, not what tick box I can fill next.

Two years ago, Nyah's and my first home was a caravan. It was precious and difficult time. I started working through a very difficult transition away from my family home. There were tears and guilt and food and love and it was our haven. We created routines and found we fitted very well together in a small space.

It was the strange combination of the depths of despair while I navigated massive change along with the relief of being freed from my old life and the bliss of being in love.

Of great urgency was finding a home that the children could come and live in some of the time. I was a student and Nyah was running a small business. Everything was expensive. And grotty. And in the end, we found an inexpensive and grotty flat a suburb away from the children's school.

We met the doddery landlord to sign up. The lease was in Nyah's name. "Are you sisters or flatmates?" asked the doddery landlord's wife. We looked at each other and said "Flatmates."

We hoped upon hope that this would work...but we couldn't really to say it to the world.

We combined our furniture and knick-knacks and stories and made a home. The children came and made it their home, too. I have stashed away the little door labels that my daughter made with our names on them. One for everyone. They are part of our story. My littlest son drew a picture of the house complete with its rainbow sticker on the door and the purple drapes. When we moved in Nyah and I staged an apple crumble competition with the children as judges. I won. We did this on the one year anniversary of the great 'Crumble Off' and Nyah's crumble was declared just as good. We adopted Molly the cat who shuns the adults when the children are here. We walk across the road to the Sunday market, where the children have gone from sheer terror at the pressing throngs of people, to confident in navigating it without adults in order to spend their $2 'market money' on homemade biscuits from the stall under the big tree, and the cheapest softdrink they can find.

We've had our share of problems, too. The doddery landlord is also cheap and unethical. The children sometimes struggle with having two homes, with figuring out where Nyah fits in their lives, with not having space to hang their clothes up in their tiny rooms.

Now its time to move on, and we have found a new house. Its a house this time. It stands alone on a full section and it faces a lovely park. Nyah found it on Facebook and we went to meet the landlord. She introduced me as her partner. I filled out the Bond form with my name on it. We put photos of it on Facebook announcing we were moving, and received 89 likes and positive comments about how much we deserve to be happy.

Two years ago we slunk into our grotty flat, our lives and others' turned upside down, unsure of how this would all turn out. We made a life and made a home built on love and faith and lots of hard work.

I am sure my feelings about our humble, new little house must be like those of a young couple who's first declaration to the world about the earnestness of their relationship is to buy a grotty flat. I feel like after two years we can celebrate our new life. We welcome people to celebrate with us, but it seems they don't need an invitation because they have been with us all along.

Our new life has begun. It is filled with love and it is good.

40

My beloved is on the other side of the world, and yesterday I didn't manage that very well.

Every bit of relationship advice (especially for lesbians!) warns against living in each other's pockets. It says you have to have your own identities, your own interests, your own friends.

I shouldn't be so 'attached.'

I shouldn't be so 'dependent.'

I was on the verge of tears most of the day, but I had to let it happen, and examine why I felt this way.

Was it just because I was missing her? Or was it more about being alone shining light on my own insecurities and it was very, very uncomfortable?

So I worked through it.

Early on in our relationship, when it was still secret, there were a couple of times that she went off on holidays with her then partner, and the unease was palpable. It was a part of what pushed us to leave and be together. "Comfortable with you, uncomfortable without you" was how we described it.

So while Nyah is overseas working, learning, experiencing all sorts of wonderful things, I am still here doing the day to day stuff. I don't feel jealous. Not at all. I think what I feel is that she has stepped out of my world for a while, and I feel a bit lost at sea.

Nyah is a strong personality. She has a clear identity and is so very sure of who she is. And what she is doing on the other side of the world is no more than she deserves after years of hard work, and fits with her skills and aptitudes. And its food on our table. Another tension in my mind after pushing against all the patriarchal norms of being 'looked after.' I vehemently want to be an equal partner in the financial management of our household, but simply do not have the means to be.

I realised that my discomfort while she is absent isn't to do with her absence. Its to do with feeling despondent about being 40 and cobbling together three part time jobs to make enough money to pay the rent and not much else. I read just tonight that how I'm feeling at this time in my life is a symptom of Imposter Syndrome.

How many of you feel discouraged when surrounded by people with incredible accomplishments, not jealous or envious, but sad that you haven’t done much with your life? 

I read this and thought YES! YES! This is it exactly!!

I have friends who will point out the time I have spent with my children is a lot to have done with my life. And they'd be right. But as I talked about in another post, the investment, particularly the emotional investment, in spending time with small children and not being in the paid workforce, is desirable, noble, well meant. But in our world - a consumerist, capitalist society - its at odd with a society that values money making productivity over all else.

Love doesn't put food on the table.

I sit alongside children struggling with learning every day. I get paid close to minimum wage to do it. I have to tag two other jobs onto that time, because nobody gets paid to work with at risk children for longer than 16 hours a week. Its an 'honourable' job. I look into the eyes of children who's parents are disenfranchised, disengaged, disinterested, desperate, and tell them I believe in them. I love their stories. I find them something to eat when there's nothing in their cupboards. I hope with desperate hope that forming a relationship with the boy who has already pushed two of his classmates by 9:30 in the morning will be something he can carry into what seems to be a hopeless future.

Nobody gets paid much to hope, though. 

Nobody wants to pay anyone to relate to anyone else unless there's money to be made.

Nyah's training and extensive experience has given her a mixture of using the right skills, tools, and most importantly, her humanity to be able to make a difference.. It might be that she has to do that under the umbrella of a corporate overlord, but that fact remains that she knows how, and she can.

So yes...I miss Nyah dreadfully. I go through our bedtime routine of turning off the light and rolling over and the nothingness makes my heart drop. But she will be home soon, fired up with all the learning she has done and thinking about how to make that work for everyone she talks to for her job.

I want that for me, too. I want to be able to afford to house and feed my children without help. I want an identity that is outside being someone's Mum or partner or wife. And I want it to be somewhere and in something that helps others. Helps the disenfranchised, disengaged, disinterested and desperate. Maybe it has to be making money for someone else. But if I can bring hope and courage to one person, then its worth it.

All that relationship advice about not being joined at the hip is about independence. Well, whatever. I am proud to be in a relationship with someone who is constantly thinking about people's stories, people's relationships, and how they bring out the best in people.

If Nyah can work her way to a place where those things matter, and those things pay a decent wage, then so can I!

My values are firm but the next step is to make a living from them.

This is my year.

Wishing

Speed. Rush. Rhythm. Tears. Longing.  Ache. Reverberation. Beat. Escape. Proximity. West. Memory. Oh well.

2013

Back to the Future

Today is the anniversary of my marriage. I haven't been able to officially end it yet, so by the time I do in January, I will have been legally married for twenty years.

It is also the the date that Marty McFly arrives from the future, according to the movie Back to the Future II, released in 1989.

In 1989 I was in my first year of high school. With the benefit of hindsight, I was crushing on a girl while at the same time discussing the boy she liked with her. I probably wrote in my diary about dreams I harboured of weddings and white picket fences. I loved trashy pre-teen romance novels.

I never would have imagined that by the year 2015 I would have committed adultery, left the marriage I aspired to as a teenager, and have outed myself as the queer I denied being without saying a word, but by making it clear the woman I live with is my partner.

My view of my future was myopic. Shaped by the narrow circumstances of my life and the lives of those around me.

If I could go back to 1989, what would I tell thirteen year old me? How would I have liked the past to look like for me so that my future wasn't a gigantic roundabout where I feel like I am in the same place at nearly forty as I was when I was eighteen?

I would tell thirteen year old me that marriage and babies aren't everything. That I am smart and resourceful enough to build a future for myself before sharing it with anyone else. That in a neo-liberal economy, looking after babies at home might be honourable, and probably in children's best interests, but it leaves you financially bereft - nobody cares because its not 'productive' work. That I need time to work out what my values are. That I need exposure to different people, cultures, beliefs and lifestyles in order to figure out what will work for me. That I need to go to university, not just for the learning from study, but the learning from people. That I need to read widely. That actually I'm in love with a girl, and its ok.

But then of course the world would have had to look very different, too. In a sea of white, Anglo-Christian, heteronormative nuclear families, where would I have gotten the idea that my life could have looked different?

Part of me struggles with the concept of being married. My belief systems shifted, and so the value I placed on marriage also changed. I still carry my married name around on official documents like a kind of shackle that I can't loosen until January. I doubt I will ever marry again.

But on the other hand, the journeys we go on make up our stories. My marriage was not unhappy. My children are a blessing. But like those knarled trees that grow through the fences that contain them, my growth outstripped my surroundings and I needed a new place to grow.

We look with amusement and derision now at what the citizens of 1989 thought 2015 would look like.

My daughter's parents live apart and her mother's partner is a woman. At school she does most of her work on a computer. She asked the other day what we meant when we made a reference to Moses. She doesn't know who 'God' is. She listens to music on You Tube. She and her friend still know about fairytale princesses and happy ever afters. They might even hope for them. But they know that they are pretend.

As I head towards the end of my marriage, I feel like I'm starting over. I gained a lot over the last twenty years, but I lost so very much as well.

In another twenty years, I hope that I am settled in the authentic me.

And that my daughter is enjoying ambling down the myriad of paths that will be available to her, finding her own way.

Her own future.

New lenses

"Actually, the cheerleading sequences are one of the few things I don’t like about the film, since lesbians are far more likely to fall in love with a girl’s stray curl or delicate cheekbones than FULL-ON TITS."

This was a in a review for an old, very camp but by all accounts amusing, iconic lesbian film. This statement was affirmed in the comments section of the review,  and it was somewhat of an epiphany for me.

In figuring out if I was attracted to women, I was asking from the point of view of attractiveness as it is presented to us for MALE consumption.

I struggled with understanding the concept of sexual attraction. 

We receive lots of messages that a sexy woman equals instant arousal in a man. This is a sexist idea, really, suggesting that men are at the mercy of their erections. This moves from being unfair to being downright dangerous in the context of rape culture... that women need to guard their behaviour and and appearance because of the lack of self control of men. But I digress.

I didn't feel any kind of rumbling in my nethers for either gender, so I was confused. But when I think about all sorts of scenarios from my past, and tie it to the concept in the above quote? Then maybe I've been in love dozens of times. And that might be with an aspect of a woman's appearance, or might be her sense of humour, it might be her intelligence. It doesn't mean I instantly feel aroused and want to jump into bed with them.

And that was certainly the case with Nyah. When I reflect on the last few years, I have always been interested in her. Memories of our brief exchanges at our workplace have stuck with me in remarkable detail. And what drew us together originally was good old fashioned chemistry along with the enjoyment of intelligent conversation,  shared values and mutual understanding of some our life experiences. I didn't look at her boobs and go "Whoar!"

That said, I experience physical desire for her that I do not remember experiencing since I was a teenager. And that wasn't and isn't about arousal. It is about a desire for physical closeness and intimacy.

And that, I suppose, is the key.

Boobs are awesome, but the heart, soul and mind are where beauty resides and true love blossoms. 

For me, to look for that in a man seems foreign.

The heart, soul, mind...and body...of a woman is where I feel at home.

Assumptions

When I first started wondering if I was a lesbian, I grappled with issues around presentation. I had read books about lesbian history, and all about the coded dressing that went on when lesbians couldn’t be out and proud… labrys earrings and pinky rings with a wink and a nudge. Stereotypes lived on with the idea in my head that most lesbians dressed like male truck drivers in steel capped boots and flannel shirts. The books I had read about middle aged women discovering their attraction to women advised that they go and mix and mingle with the ‘lesbian community.’ But…. how do you do that? For a start, I didn’t know where I’d look. And if lesbians dress like men, then how on earth would I fit in?

I read Lisa Diamond’s book about sexual fluidity, and got quite stroppy about labelling. Why have a label? I don’t need one. Plenty are doing without. I continue to be confused by all the issues around labelling and presentation, and even queer media seems to have different views.

Even in the last week, I read an article about femme invisibility being a ‘dirty secret’ of the queer community. That is, the lesbian community largely presenting as butch, and excluding and erasing women who identified as lesbian, but presented in a feminine way. You know - ‘You’re too pretty to be a lesbian.”

Then on the other hand, this piece was posted by an online magazine called ‘PRIDE’ which claims to be be a platform for queer millenials. Queer millenials seem to be throwing off labels, which then seems contrary to this piece which reinforces stereotypes about lesbians wearing boots and flannel shirts.

This is so incredibly problematic, as it is not only a community being non-inclusive, but doing so to the point of reinforcing stereotypes.

But this still happens, and I am utterly puzzled as to why. I tried joining a few lesbian Facebook groups, and the ‘exclusivity’ was annoying. I heard about a local lesbian event, and asked the administrator of one of the groups if she’d post it for member. “Oh, I’ll see what the organiser says. But its probably not necessary - its a well known event in the community.”

I see.

What if I don’t belong to ‘the community’ yet? How will I find out? Remember back at Stage One, where the books said ‘find the lesbian community?’ Well, how is that going to happen when the ‘community’ cloaks itself in some kind of exclusiveness?

I can understand discretion if you are doing something that is generally not approved of in society, but has ‘the community’ not realised that we have equality on pretty much all fronts? Any discrimination that lesbians face won’t be because they're gay - it will be because they’re women.

Other online magazines have been exploring the idea of doing away with labels, and celebrities like Miley Cyrus talk about ‘fluidity’ rather than taking on sexual identities related to attraction to any particular gender.

While I have been pondering what label to wear, I have enthusiastically posted articles about not labelling.

Then a lesbian friend said “But I don’t want people assuming I’m straight.”

She raised an excellent point, but I have explored that a bit further in my own personal context. I still don’t have a set identity. Other people label me as a lesbian, and that’s fine. I suppose I resist labelling because I think that there are more important defining things about me as a person than the gender of the person I’m in a romantic relationship with. In any case, labelling sexual identities is a relatively new phenomenon. We can thank the Victorians and their urge to catalogue and classify everything for that. 

And then I hit on it.

I don’t want people assuming I’m with a man.

I don’t want people assuming I’m married.

I don’t want people assuming I’m coupled at all.

I don’t want those things for anyone, actually.

Perhaps it was not so much that I don't want assumptions made about who I'm attracted to or romantically involved with or deeply in love with or having sex with. Because that's kind of personal, right? But more that I don't want about assumptions made about which societal box I fit into. As the writer of the article in DIVA said, In fact, by self-labelling as gay, my real intended meaning is that I don't fit the heteronormative category.

I remember when I was a newlywed nineteen year old I took a bit of pleasure in subverting people’s ideas about what I should be. So I suppose that’s an example in and of itself. 

Don’t assume that a nineteen year old isn't married, and don’t assume a nearly forty year old is.

And don’t assume all lesbians wear flannel.

Still looking

While I was at university, I took advantage of having access to an academic library for my own self- development and exploration. There I discovered the writing of Tamsin Wilton, a lesbian academic from the UK. I had mostly read books written by and about Americans, so it was refreshing to read from a different cultural point of view. I enjoyed Ms Wilton's acerbic style, and wanted to seek out more of her books. Funnily enough, I cannot now find even the name the book I originally read of her's, and was also to find that getting hold of her other books was going to be no easy task. I managed to source two of her books in the UK via an obscure online seller.  

Finger-licking Good: The Ins and Outs of Lesbian Sex. 
1996.

Not as titillating as it sounds, this one was very political. It wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but interesting nonetheless.A book nearly twenty years old and written from a UK perspective was going to offer a view of a different world to twenty first century New Zealand. This book examined the patriarchal undermining of women's sexuality - both identities and activities - and how feminism and lesbianism intersected. Living in a world where people are increasingly choosing not to label themselves, the idea of the 'political lesbian' was an interesting one. One to read once, and I have since donated this one to The Charlotte Museum Trust.



Unexpected Pleasures: Leaving Heterosexuality for a Lesbian Life. 
2002
Always eager to read other people's stories, this was the book I really wanted to get my hands on. Ms Wilton did not write this book as an academic piece, but as a collection of stories supporting her own experience as someone who had lived a heterosexual life, and had not come out as a lesbian until her 30s. Of course there were many other stories I had read about the very same thing, but most were very old and very American. But one of the distinguishing features of Ms Wilton's point of view was that women make a choice. That it isn't necessarily a case of "Well, I always knew...but.." That they initially had enjoyable heterosexual relationships but later developed a lesbian identity.


I also stumbled across this one on Kindle. I was surprised that I hadn't found it earlier, but very glad I finally had.

Lesbian Epiphanies: Women coming out in later life. 
Karol L. Jensen, MPH, PhD. 
Routledge 1999

This book wasn't just about women's own stories, but also examined the society that kept them on the route of heteronormative marriage and family life. From the foreword by Paula Rust, 

"In great detail, she explores the ways in which females are socialized into ignoring their own experiences of self, particularly their own sexual desires, in favour of socially encouraged concepts of womanhood."

This book was important for me because of its exploration of many aspects of identity, and illustrates the power of our society's heterosexist and misogynist norms to shape our lives and experiences.


It seems a long time ago that I started searching for answers, but sometimes starting a journey of exploration throws up more questions than you thought to ask to begin with. I think we always seek to find validation in other people's experiences, because they make us feel less alone. It has been useful to absorb the stories of more women like me - like me not just because they were set on a journey of questioning their sexuality, but their whole identity. Its been good to discover that although it would be nice to look up a book or do an internet search to find an answer to my questions, that actually the journey is important. It teaches you things. It reinforces that you can't put people in boxes and that although we have things in common, that we are all individuals with our own paths to walk and discoveries to make.