Alphabet Soup

In July last year I began some serious questioning about the structure of families, relationships, and began to ask some questions about my own sexuality.  My questions began in a very broad context around whether I still held on to my values around long term monogamy and marriage.  The issues around having been in such a long term relationship from such a young age surfaced during therapy in 2012, but at the time were put aside while I dealt with more pressing issues - managing anxiety and panic attacks.  My blog posts about 'finding myself' were veiled while I struggled with movement away from my traditional values systems, while I questioned the conditioning of my childhood, and sought to understand a growing awareness that I might be attracted to women. I began talking to a friend about all the issues I was wrestling with - autonomy, values systems, what to do with my life beyond being a mother, how I was questioning my sexuality.  And then I fell for her.

I read and read and read.  Books about women like me in long-term relationships with men who had fallen in love with women.  I'm still reading, and sometimes closing books in tears from the emotion of seeing women just like me on those pages.  

One of the struggles I have had is with how to label myself. "So, are you bisexual now?"  "People like you up my gay friend quota."  My partner is a lesbian, which probably labels me by association, but I'm not sure I'm ready for a lesbian identity.  I might be bisexual, but my reading has made me aware of the animosity that can be directed at bisexual people...and I just don't know where men fit on my spectrum because I'm not with one now.  The best answer I found was in the work of Dr Lisa Diamond on sexual fluidity.  At least it was a start.  A possibility.  Diamond's research suggests that women can move through several 'orientations' in a lifetime.  That isn't to suggest that there is an element of 'choice' but for those who are not firmly lesbian or bisexual, it may be that they are simply able to move through different attractions dependent on things such as environment, people around them, present circumstances and so on.  It might explain why I had experienced traditional heterosexual relationships (albeit only as a teenager) without feeling any of them were 'wrong,' but rather that it seems that being with a woman is more 'right.'   More and more women appeared in my life for whom 'unlabelled' was their best descriptor.  Women were popping up all over the place who were falling for women after being in heterosexual relationships for many years.  Women who were married to each other but didn't identify as lesbians. A new friend in a similar situation to me was asked if she knew she was gay.  "No more than I knew I was straight." It was a relief to not feel like I had to label myself.

It looks more and more like the LGBT community understands this too.  Looking at the website for OUTline they cover all labels with a kind of alphabet soup.  GLBTTFIQQ - gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, takataapui, intersex, fa’afafine, queer and questioning.  Sure, its a mouthful, but it acknowledges that very broad variety that exists on the sexuality spectrum.

I am moving through a process of figuring out where I sit in the world.  A process of figuring out if I need a label, and if I do, what will it be?  My partner appreciates my honesty in my exploration, and I appreciate her not needing me to be anything in particular.

There might have been a time when you needed to 'come out' as something.  But now I can just come out as me, and take comfort in the array of labels I can choose - if I want one.

What we might be...and what we become.

Apparently as people who are questioning come to an acceptance of lesbian/gay or bisexual orientation, they go through a phase of feeling angry about the heterosexism that exists in the world. I felt this acutely after a prominent sportsman came out and everyone applauded how brave he is. People keep saying I'm brave as I reveal that I have left a heterosexual marriage and embarked on a relationship with a woman. And although I acknowledge the comments about bravery are also about making big life changes overall, I felt angry that anyone needs to feel 'brave' about doing this. That the world may be such a hostile place to us that to reveal that you have any orientation towards the same sex is 'brave.' You also come to realise how strong heteronormative and heterosexist influence is. Indeed, it shaped my last twenty years and more.

Looking back, I realise that I experienced same sex attraction in my past. Not as an obvious sexual orientation at first, but more as an emotional connection. When my mother found out about a one off physical experience, she confronted me about being 'queer.' I have no memory of this confrontation, but did write about it in my diary in extremely defensive bullet points. Through my teenage years, I diarised about a desire to connect emotionally and physically with a particular person of the same sex, but much of my diary was also filled with idealism about marriage and babies and houses with white picket fences. Its what I aspired to and what I assumed my life would look like going forward.

The concept of being a housewife was not actually a prevailing social norm. Girls were encouraged to seek careers across the spectrum. There were not old fashioned attitudes about doing only nursing or teaching until you got married. But somehow in my mind I had made marriage and babies my career goal.  I was a smart girl, but I had steered towards arts subjects that I was good at but that didn't seem to have much value in the job marketplace. My self esteem was not great, and I didn't feel competent at sciences, which is where it seemed the careers were to be had.  Somehow, despite all the encouragement that meant that this was not the only option, I wanted to emulate my mother and live a life like her's.

I remember the speculation about whether one of our teachers was a lesbian. This was steeped in stereotypes - an older woman with short grey hair, a deep voice who never wore skirts. This was the only exposure I'd had with the LGBT world (and even then that was only assumed) but it wasn't very reliable because it was not based in fact. It didn't tell me anything about the experiences that exist for women who love women, so being with a woman was still not something that was considered an 'option.'

Around the time of my eighteenth birthday I wrote in my diary with the same level of uncertainty about my future that I expressed on this blog. I said "I don't really know who I am" and that I don't really know what I'll do with my life..." "What I am now scares me, but I can't help but believe its for a reason." Twenty years on I could have written the same diary entry.

I 'ran away from home' by way of going to Dunedin to attend art school. It was in my part time job that I met the man that was to become my husband. I was impressed by his family values. He fell in love at first sight, and I fell in love with the idea of fulfilling my destiny as someone's wife. He courted me properly with flowers and dinner and the promise of a home filled with love. It was romantic and at the time it was right.

He now questions whether I ever really loved him. I can say without a doubt that I did. I loved him with all the capacity for love that I had. But I know that part of what I was in love with was a concept, and a values system. Once I started to question the values and concepts under which I was conducting my life, the house of cards started to tumble. I will always carry a sadness that by escaping that life I broke his heart.  The paradox is that I do not regret the life I led with him, but at the same time feel like that if my world had been different as a teenager, things might not have turned out the way they have.

As I look back on the last twenty years, memories emerge of things that have happened where this latent attraction to my own sex bubbled to the surface every now and then. At the time I never explored it further, probably because the peace and comfort of my life as I knew it outweighed any need to know any more about the hidden parts of me. Some of the reading I have done in the last few months has shown that very often women make changes after traumatic events like the death of a parent, or at the time of major transition, like the youngest child starting school. Both of these have happened to me in the last few years. These life shifts can be the catalyst for a massive re-evaluation and time of discovery.

I was happy in my marriage for a long time because I didn't know what I didn't have. This wasn't anybody's fault. My former husband need not feel inadequate, because this was to do with me and to do with the culture we exist in. There was a huge amount of happiness and security to be found in fulfilling socially endorsed roles and coasting along on a socially acceptable course in life. Stepping outside the norms makes me reliant on my own tools of self examination, self awareness and communication because there is no institution to fall back on. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I can now see what was missing. I am so very conscious that the situation that we were in simultaneously suffocated me, but provided him with security.  I wonder if he felt for me what I feel for my new partner.  If that is the case, I will always hold a regret that I had to hurt him so badly to free myself. I can't do anything now other than apply the lessons learned to my future. I have no desire to turn back. Now I am experiencing a completeness and wholeness that I have not felt before, even though I am still on my own journey.

Being with my female partner feels like the most natural thing in the world. I have been very lucky not to have experienced any hostility. However, every now and then I experience a jolt that makes me realise how I am now part of a minority. The IRD officer who helped me apply for Working for Families assumes my partner is male. A guy at the service station asks if my partner is my friend or my sister. The landlord asks if we are sisters or just flatmates (and at the time we did say 'flatmates.')  The woman at the service desk at The Warehouse types "Mrs" into her computer when recording my name for a refund. While the world is not hostile to people in same sex relationships, the first assumption is that you are with a man - and certainly, by a certain age the assumption still seems to be made that you are married to a man.

My children have had their world shaken, and are having to reframe their ideas about family that they have come to believe, too. This has been traumatic for them, but they are managing very well. But in the long run I think this bodes well for the world they will live in, and in some ways I am grateful that they are discovering this now. In a world where homophobia and sexism is frowned upon, but gender role stereotypes and heteronormitivity is rife, my children can see that when they are grown, it will be ok to fall in love with a man OR a woman. That they could live with that man or woman, they could marry that man or woman, they could live alone, they can be what they want for a career, they can choose to have a family or not, and that all of those choices are valid. That they don't just know that academically, but actually see that in practice, and see that it can work.

My hope is that the heteronormative script in their head is rewritten. That they can actually see all the possibilities that exist for them, and not be blinkered by set ideas the way I was. If I could go back to eighteen year old me, I would tell her slow down and allow herself time to explore. To start to do that late in life is painful and hard and likely to hurt people they care about.

It was too late for me. Its not too late for them.

What has also occurred to me since writing is not just the impact this has on my children, but on other families we know.  I had not taken into account that my friends are placed in the position of explaining to their children - my children's friends - about my living situation.  To their credit, they do all treat it as 'situation normal' and I trust them to answer questions thoughtfully and factually.  Yes, it is difficult explaining the choice not to stay with my children's father, but the flip side is that they will see as an everyday thing a female couple who are not doing anything other than living normal and ordinary lives.  The heteronormative script will be rewritten in their heads, too.

Saudade and the night

I originally wrote this post nearly a year ago.  Going back to it I considered posting this on my creative writing blog... but reading back, I think although it seems trivial in the midst of 'big' stuff going on, in my own context in my own mind it fits perfectly.  So...just read and relate (if it fits) and enjoy.

I often write my blog posts late at night.  I seem to have the right creative energy at that time, and words flow more easily.  With any writing that I do,  I seem incubate ideas in my mind, sometimes for long periods of time until the opportunity and the inclination arises to put them into words on a page.

Something else that also happens at night is that I might watch old movies or listen to old music.  In the world of a GenXer, this of course means movies and songs from the 1980s or even 90s.  As most people know, even if subconsciously, music has a way of have evoking memories, emotions and even physical sensations like smell.  I assume that, like generations before us, we return to the music of our childhood as it evokes a time when we were happy, innocent, with no worldly cares on our shoulders.  I will have Wikipedia on my phone at the ready, will look up the artists I see in whatever music video or moving is playing at the time.  I'll marvel that Brad Pitt is nearly 50 or that Kylie Minogue is closer to that than the youthful Charlene of Neighbours, and wonder where the time went.  I will think of my own children, forming their own memories, and wonder what movies and music will be the hallmarks of their generation; what rituals do we partake in that are laying the foundations for them to look back on from the big bad world and evoke those feelings of contentment and safety.

The feeling that I would get at these times evaded description.  Indeed, I'd never needed to try.  I have attempted to above, but the words still do not seem to embody the depth of the sensations I would experience.  And then I found...

SAUDADE

This fabulous word was like an epiphany to me when I read its Wikipedia entry, which describes it thus:

Saudade is a Portuguese and Galician word that has no direct translation in English. It describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic or deeply melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing will never return.[2] A stronger form of saudade may be felt towards people and things whose whereabouts are unknown, such as a lost lover, or a family member who has gone missing.

Saudade was once described as "the love that remains" after someone is gone. Saudade is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the senses and makes one live again. It can be described as an emptiness, like someone (e.g., one's children, parents, sibling, grandparents, friends, pets) or something (e.g., places, things one used to do in childhood, or other activities performed in the past) that should be there in a particular moment is missing, and the individual feels this absence. It brings sad and happy feelings all together, sadness for missing and happiness for having experienced the feeling.

Whoever created and edited this Wikipedia entry managed to describe exactly what I was experiencing, and the Portuguese packaged this description into one word.  This feeling has become more intense as I grow older - and perhaps its intensity will continue to grow as more time is put between now and those happy times, particularly those with people who are no longer with us.

I do feel I have to guard myself against too much slipping into the past, and practice a kind of mindfulness that ensures I am not blind to the present and all the blessings it has to offer. 

But now and then I indulge.  I put on MTV Classic or read a few chapters of Anne of Green Gables and escape to another time.  That time is long gone and my young self in that time has passed through.  But the memories and sensations remain strong.  I will take that time and enjoy 'the love that remains' and my time lost in saudade.

The story so far...

Its been six months since I wrote, and indeed its been six months since I've had time to write.  All the self examination of the last ten months has culminated in taking action.  Action that has created chaos, but is also the turning point I needed.

In January this year I made the difficult to decision to leave my husband and my family home.  The difficulty was perhaps not so much in the deciding to do it, but in actually taking action.  And the difficulty was the emotional havoc I would wreak on someone who had not made the same shifts I had.  It was not until February that I revealed to my husband that I had been seeing someone else, and that someone else was a woman.  At around the same time, she left a long term relationship, and we made the decision to stay together and move forward together.

In this time, I have learned a huge amount.  About myself, about our culture and our norms, about love and sexuality, about friendship and family, about power and values systems.  Throw into this mix that I have also become a full time student of the social sciences, you could say I am on the most incredible journey of self discovery.

So that is the story so far.  Amid all the learning I have done I have found that our lives are full of surprises - unwritten rules that must not be broken, written rules that people break all the time, labels, categories, boxes and behaviour we assign to all of them.

There is plenty to be said about that - and in time I will be one of the ones to say it.

Watch this space.

Three years on: liberation through loss

This last weekend I commemorated the third anniversary of my mother’s death.  At the same time, the suicide bereavement group Solace held their annual candle lighting service.

I went along to this in order to mark this anniversary, to think of Mum, to be in solidarity with others who had experienced similar loss, and because I like the idea of ritual.

It turned out to be a different experience than I thought it would be.

What would have been Mum’s 80^th birthday marked a turning point for me in terms of thinking about the direction I’m headed.  I covered this in my previous post, and in several others I talked about my loss of autonomy early in adulthood.

Before this anniversary I had already had issues come up for me around areas fundamental to my identity.  These were already turning over in my head before her birthday anniversary came up.

I have begun a retrospective journey and begun to question everything I have known since I was a child.  Naturally, one’s mother is the predominant guide through the early years while ideas about how life might look like are forming.  As I grew I decided that I wanted my life to look like hers. 

But looking back now, I wonder if I decided that, or if it was decided for me. I made conscious choices that led to a life like hers, but was I really fully informed about what those choices might mean?

Retrospection has meant looking at some experiences of my teenage years, and wondering ‘what if?’ 

I am fortunate to have detailed diaries from the age of 11 to about 18 where I have laid bare my soul.  I have to read between the lines of adolescent angst, but there is plenty to draw from.

As I sat in the church while everyone took their turns to light their memorial candle, it dawned on me that sitting here was not about Mum.  It had become about me.

With her passing I had been freed from all the constraints of the life she conditioned me to live.  Of believing that was the only way.  Of disappointing her if I didn't live that way.

I had been freed from the pain of her loss, but it’s possible that the pain isn't over yet.  Now it’s time to deal with the pain of self-examination.  It’s time to figure out who I am, what I believe and what I want my life to look like now that I no longer have the trellis of her life to grow against.

It’s made me realize that I don’t really know and that it’s not going to be an easy process to find out.  Until now, for the last twelve years at least, my identity has been tied to other people, and it’s a struggle to figure out where and who *I* am.

So now I begin.  Books.  Space.  Reflection.  Dreaming.  Thinking.  Crying.  Confusion.  It’s all there.

It’s going to be hell of a ride.

"Just enjoy who you are"

Today would have been my mother's 80th birthday.  Landmark events associated with my parents are always interesting, as they make me pause for reflection and think about how I am progressing through the odd journey that is grief.  

Today I acknowledged that I am no longer consumed with feelings of loss, but rather moving into a positive period of looking forward.

After a huge amount of time dwelling in the land of glass-is-half-empty, devoid of motivation and enthusiasm, this is great progress.

A friend and I had a conversation the other night in which she said I was an overthinker - a deep thinker...and that I should 'just enjoy who you are.'

 But what if I don't know who I am?  Huge shifts in my life have made me a different person and I have to get to know her all over again.

What are my goals? What are my values?  What do I want to do and be beyond someone's wife and mother?  What do I want to change in the world?  How can I find the means to do that?  Who are the important people in my life?

Who am I.....really?

Some of these questions require a bit of looking back.  How I respond and react to my present has roots in my past.  Most of the questions aren't perplexing - they're exciting gateways to new possibilities.  Some of them are puzzling and bewildering and are taking me on a journey to the past and back again.  My life from the age of twelve is being re-examined with eyes open to new possibilities and doors I never opened because they were so firmly sealed shut I was not even aware they existed.

All of this culminates in a buzzing turbulence.  Soaring highs of the excitement of self discovery coupled with swooping lows when contemplating  the complexity of change.

In my last post I talked about my revelation about my lack of autonomy. There was no period of figuring out my place the world without that place being shared by someone else.  The revelation that day left me in tears....and then I locked the thoughts about it away in that box of jumbled emotions I couldn't deal with right then.

I think now it might be ok to open the box.  I feel like a teenager on the cusp of discovering what life is about...of figuring out how to be a grown up.  I have to do it with a lot of people's needs to take into account...not just mine.  

It won't be easy but I think its time.

Doors close; doors open

Last weekend I attended a baby shower for my brother's wife, who is expecting their first child next month.  This is a big event for our family.  All our children's cousins (all on my husband's side) are grown up, and live in the South Island.  They adore them, of course, and there are advantages to having big cousins, but the idea of having a baby cousin that they can see more often than once a year (or less) is particularly thrilling. 

The excitement for me is that its my only sibling's child;  a little boy that will be able to carry on our family's name; someone besides my own children to hope and dream about.

The baby shower was delightful - silly games sit alongside the beginning of the induction of a new member to a special part of society.  A number of the party were mothers themselves, and were able to reminisce about birthing their babies, and their experiences of early motherhood.  We partook in the important social ritual of giving gifts, and admiring those that others had given.  The mother-to-be could try to comprehend that these clothes and cuddly blankets are for a real person - the person currently curled up inside her, but soon to be in her arms.

On the drive home, I had the time and distance to reflect on the experience - the joy, the anticipation, the laughter.  And then I cried.

I cried for my mother and how she threw this experience away.  Although she found social experiences awkward, particularly with people she didn't know, she would have come to this gathering.  She might have sat quietly, observing.  She would have chatted with the Oma (Grandma)-to-be, she would have had a cup of tea and ate cake and had a lovely time in her own, low key-way. 

Mum absolutely loved babies.  In her extensive writing, she includes touching diary entries about times she has cared for my children as babies, describing things like a baby falling asleep in your arms as being one of the best feelings in the world.   It does bring me to understand the depth of her desire to leave.  My brother and his wife got married in March 2010.  Mum knew how determined my sister-in-law was to have a baby, and soon.  If she knew all this - knew that there were more grandchildren in her future, more babies to rock to sleep - yet still needed to go, it is clear to us that she was suffering a despair deep enough that she felt no other way out.

I don't cry for my little unborn nephew.  He will have an Oma and Opa.  He will have uncles and aunts and cousins to love him.  So I'm not angry at Mum for leaving him before he existed, before he could even meet and know her...just incredibly sad for her. 

My last post - and the one before that, too - were an study in self-pity and melancholy.  I was in a loop of self-absorbed self-consciousness, and it had to stop.  After the realisation that I had dwelled on these feelings for so long, I pulled myself up by my figurative bootstraps and began to think about life beyond being worried about my appearance and beyond being a Mum of small children.  My youngest child will start school in February and I'll no longer have a pre-schooler.   I have begun thinking about a new career and what steps I might have to take to begin on that road.

Some doors are closing, but others are opening.  After a time of incredible devastation for our family, my unborn nephew is a sign of a rebalancing.    

He is hope.  He is love.  He is a new beginning.