The Total Femme

Monday, Anne went behind my back and got Owen the H1N1 flu mist at the clinic at school. Not only does this breach the terms of the parenting agreement we only recently filed with the court, it was a complete breach of faith between the two of us, since I had explicitly told her I didn’t want to boys vaccinated at this time.

Poor Owen – the look on my face when he told me he’d been vaccinated must have been pretty alarming. Seth immediately went for the jugular, “Didn’t you and Mommy agree?” For the first time, I let them in on more than what I usually do when it comes to talking about me and Anne: I told them that I hadn’t known Mommy was going to do that, that we didn’t agree on Owen getting vaccinated, and that I’m really shocked that it happened. Owen kind of shrugged it off, in his Dr. Love fashion – yesterday when I sent him off to school, I said, “Honey, I want to apologize again for the mix-up with the vaccine,” and he patted me on the arm and said cheerfully, “No need!” and went skipping on his merry way. Seth, on the other hand, is obviously freaked out: if me and Anne aren’t going to get back together, we’re at least supposed to be a solid unit taking care of them.

After a night from hell Monday (on the couch, crying, up at 3am watching Season 2 of “Big Love”, filled with rage against Anne and her insanity, etc.), I got up, got the boys off to school, and called my lawyer. In his mild, don’t-be-asking-me-to-hold-your-hand-honey way, he told me that I could file for contempt but it might or might not go my way, or he could write a stern letter to Anne’s lawyer. I chose stern letter, and that was sent, and thanks to modern technology, she got it the very same day. Much later in the day, I remembered my lawyer had said, too, that it often takes about a year to get agreements like this running smoothly.

With much deep breathing and concentrating on the blessings of my family, I managed to let the rage dissipate, and me, my Beau, Seth and Owen had a gorgeous day yesterday, celebrating Thanksgiving early (they’re at Anne’s for the actual day this year), and enjoying being together. A fire, the puppy, a few rounds of Boggle after a simply amazing meal if I do say so myself, and bedtime stories. When they went to Anne’s today, I was able to let them go without tears, with joy, because they have another family, and that family is also incredibly important to them and that is ok. Gorgeous days like the one we had yesterday are like an inoculation against separation. We connect and love each other so deeply, that it’s ok to be apart for a while. Won’t be no skin off our noses.

Today, I am even calmer. I am so grateful to have this agreement in place – hey! we swore in front of the very grumpy judge that we would abide by it! – and to have recourse when Anne goes cracker jack after reading yet one more incendiary news article about how we’d better all panic to the nth degree about this flu. As unforgivable and crazy as it was for her to lie, go behind my back, undermine my credibility with the boys, and expose Owen’s precious body to god knows what in that stupid vaccine, at least this agreement has my back and I can come down on her with my lawyer’s help to give her a reality check. “Agreement” doesn’t mean whatever Anne wants. “Agreement” means we have to agree, and if one person says no, then we don’t agree and it doesn’t happen, whatever it is. And if she keeps acting like she can do whatever she wants, then she will be in contempt, and I will definitely take her back to court. There are two of us parenting here, and we are very different from each other and that is one reason why we got a divorce and that is why we hammered out this parenting agreement.

She wrote me an email yesterday saying she knows we’re having “significant vaccine issues” and she would like to “discuss what happened” with me after she talks to her lawyer again. Here’s the beauty of my post-agreement world: I don’t have to discuss shit with her. No means no.

Owen may or may not be immune to the swine flu now, but I feel pretty confident that my Beau and I are doing our job giving him and his brother the biggest and best dose of love that we possibly can, and that that will set them up for a life in which people are loose cannons, even people close to them like their other mom, and where there is a lot of disappointment, transition, loss, and confusion to navigate. There are also hugs, puppies splayed out in front of the fire, purple cauliflower and homemade gravy, raucous games of Boggle, and bedtime stories. Now that is a shot in the arm.

Recently, due perhaps to some kind of deep, personal flaw, I have been watching a lot of “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.” I didn’t catch it the first time around, but I am certainly enjoying it now. I’m a little more than halfway through the second season, and if you haven’t seen it and think you might, then stop reading now because I’m going to be talking plot.

I read somewhere that Willow discovers she’s a lesbian, and it’s just so exciting waiting to see how that’s going to go down. Right now, she just caught Xander kissing Cordelia and she’s super upset. She’s also been flirting with that Oz guy. It got me thinking about how complicated the coming out process is, how long it can take, how confusing it is. In her book, My Dangerous Desires; A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home, Amber Hollibaugh discusses a propensity she had before she knew she was queer:

After high school and still straight, I nurtured my addiction to jealous dramas. I was bored with heterosexuality; heartbreak and jealous betrayal made it a hell of a lot more impressive [and Willow has the extra added impressiveness of getting to watch her good friend make it with a vampire! ttf]. It also kept alive my hope that there was still a chance for me; I wasn’t quite the freak I thought myself to be. My explosive emotional life covered the genuine drama I was avoiding.

This propensity, I also had. In college, (still straight), I was also nurturing my addiction to jealous dramas with a long, drawn out saga involving 2 of my best friends who eventually got together, leaving me to play the role of mascot, unable to face my own genuine drama. I suppose any queer girl could get caught up in this crazy stuff, but I think femmes in particular are susceptible because with guys, I mean, there’s something there that’s interesting. The masculinity part is good, it’s just not the right packaging.

I don’t know if Willow is really a lesbian and she’s probably not going to be a femme (although she would make a totally adorable geeky one, for sure), but I’m rooting for her. I also don’t know if the main character of Haven Kimmel’s novel, Something Rising (Light and Swift) is queer because she’s pretty secretive about herself (a clue, perhaps), but she sure acts like a butch. (Stop now if you don’t want to hear about the story!) From the time she’s ten and working hard to improve a shack out by the river to right now in the book (I’m a little over halfway through) when she’s consumed with anger, not hooked up with anyone, taking care of her agoraphobic and anorexic older sister after having had to be the breadwinner and caretaker of all the rest of her family as well, she acts like a butch who has to shore up the world because no one else is stepping up. She’s also a carpenter and most of all, an extremely gifted pool player. She appears to have no sexuality at all, and when someone asks her if she’s gay, she says, “Are you trying to piss me off?” Mm hm.

In “Innocence” (Season 2, Episode 14), Cordelia asks Xander if looking at guns really makes people think about sex,  and do they make Xander think about sex? Xander says, “Cordelia, I’m 17 – looking at linoleum makes me think about sex!” Good one! And so true. But what about those of us who, also 17 or however old we were, also with hormones in overdrive, didn’t get turned on by thinking about sex with the proscribed gender and were, for whatever reason, unable to realize what gender or what gender flavor, would turn us on? All our thoughts about sex got turned elsewhere, often in incredibly destructive directions. The other day, I was just remembering when I lived in Tokyo in my early 20s and the object of my delusional affection came to visit, still not in love with me, still only in love with my friend, but I hung out with him anyway, gave him my all. I wrote a song about being his dogsbody, I would ride back to my lonely apartment at rush hour after having seen him, tears running down my face, anguish personified, for all the tired salary men and office ladies going home to admire and wonder over.

Joel, the main character in Mark Merlis’s novel Man About Town realizes at midlife that “[b]eing gay had taken up his whole life. He had devoted the whole of his youth to it, had studied it year after year as intensively as if he had been training to be a neurosurgeon. There hadn’t been time for anything else.” Part of his being gay (and mine) was first not to know or to deny that he was gay – that took a long time. Then it took a long time and a lot of devotion to being gay, and then – for me, for many femmes – a long time figuring out that I wasn’t a regulah lesbian. And here we are, me and Joel, heading rapidly towards fifty and just coming into ourselves – who we really are, with a sexuality integrated into our whole selves.

No wonder I’ve been sitting around watching Buffy!

The good news is that Seth joined the rest of us for a few rounds of Boggle this evening, completely uncomplainingly and with  gusto — pretty good for Mr. “I Don’t Want To” 13-year old.

The bad news is that he was completely amped and sang (with gusto) snippets of “White Wedding” the entire time. Loudly.

I don’t speak Spanish, but I speak another romance language (French), have been around the block a lot and even have two fabulous bilingual nephews, so I know a few words and phrases. When I listen to songs sung in Spanish, what I understand goes something like this:

“I know….here….blood….I don’t know….eat….no more….if….I don’t know….bad….pain….I’m sorry.”

In the past week or so, I’ve had serious conversations with both my sons. With Seth, it started because he accused me of meddling in his social life. Apparently, some garbled version of my visit to the guidance counselor last spring got back to him via the loose lips of a fellow parent to whom an abbreviated version had been told in confidence. Said parent told his son, who told Seth, and things got more and more telephone gamed out along the way.

What really happened was I alerted the guidance counselor to the goings-on of this group of girls who’d been texting Seth to death and requested that, if possible, they not all be in the same cluster this year, and plus, please put Seth in a 7th-grade cluster where academics, as opposed to “shut up and sit down,” are the main focus. I did not, as Seth dramatically accused, tell them to keep him away from all his friends forever and ever.

I addressed his concerns as best I could, stressing that my job as his mom is to get his back and look at the bigger picture, that I’m walking the middle ground of giving him as much privacy as I can but also keeping an eye on things.

With Owen, I held forth – passionately and eloquently, having been granted one of those transcendent parenting moments that come about now and again – on the far-reaching value and joy of learning to play the piano. Owen is good at the piano and has really big hands – he can already reach a ninth – but he gets growly about practicing and going to lessons, even though he enjoys them when he gets there and he loves sitting down and playing with me.

Again, I referenced the bigger picture, and how having learned to play the piano at his age (10) will stand him in good stead as he gets older and wants to do anything from being a techie for a musical to sing in a chorus. It’s like having a job doing something you like: even though you mostly enjoy it, there are always going to be tedious aspects. In the case of the piano, for Owen, these are reading music and doing the correct fingering. For me, it was the sinister circle of fifths, which Owen, incidentally, eats up with a spoon.

When I speak with such intensity about such important topics to my sons, I have to believe they’re listening. Or rather, that they hear me.

“….my heart….dance….sing….but….sadness….I love you.”

What they retain and what it means to them? I don’t exactly know and can only hope for the best. Perhaps it’s like what I hear in those Spanish songs that speak to me so soulfully: a few key words, and a vast and earnest outpouring of true, pure emotion. Heart to heart. Down to the most basic, human elements.  La vida.

When the boys are at their other mom’s like they are now  (we share custody), I am always sad. Sometimes sobbing sad, sometimes weepy sad, and sometimes just sad behind my eyes and in my heart.

Just now I was upstairs making Seth’s bed, and I realized how much it helps to be in his room, smoothing wrinkles out of his sheets and making sure his bed is cozy and inviting for when he gets into it tomorrow night. Neatening up in his room also helps, but I try not to go crazy, because he likes things to stay kind of messy and friendly. Owen, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to mind if I neaten up, and that helps feel me better (as baby Seth used to say) when they’re at Anne’s (my ex and their other mom).

Making a menu with my Beau and laying in supplies for the time the boys are with us also helps – it cements into place the fact that they will be here soon, under our care.

Researching summer camps (even though it’s a time suck) keeps me connected to them.

Making appointments with guidance counselors and teachers, keeping track of sports games, even if we’re not going – all of that helps.

But the bottom line is that the boys are elsewhere just about half of the time, and that is always going to be a heartbreak. Is one of these chicken soup things supposed to end on a cheery note? If so, too bad. Divorce is not cheery, at least not when it comes to the kids involved (it’s cheery that I no longer have to live with Anne, very cheery indeed!). It sucks. Divorce really, really sucks. And I miss my babies. Damn it.

*#1, New York Times Best Seller List for 15 months straight

I just got back from a ceremony in the elementary school gym swearing in the 9 or so 5th graders who have volunteered to be bankers for the school bank, sponsored, of course, by a local bank here in town. Owen, coming from my ex’s house, was wearing a suitably banker-ish blue striped button down shirt over sports pants – very natty. The banker guy had them stand up and swear a mighty swear, “I promise to do my duty for the school bank and obey the rules,” something like that. Then they all got caps with the bank logo on them and got their pictures taken. Before the ceremony started, I had been looking around the school gym, thinking about how this is our last year here, and feeling a bit choked up.

I’ve gone from homeschooling to being pretty active in the school community. I hadn’t thought I’d ever put my guys in school. Divorce and many other complicating factors have dictated otherwise.

I am a bit more humble than I once was about parenting. When it comes to just being a human trying to get along. So I am happy to report that, although I felt incipient cynical rumblings about 5 bankers being in my baby’s elementary school with their predatory claws extended and a money-eating gleam in their eye, I shoved it down and allowed Owen his glorious moment, a huge proud grin on my face. He got sworn in, then rejoined his class, where his two buddies (Ms. Tomboy and Mr. Greek God) shoved and joshed him around.

I’m still grinning.

I suppose most of us are inured to the egregious nature of cell phones. Just the idea of them is offensive, if you ask me, and certainly most of us have been made to listen to intimate and/or abusive and/or mind-numbingly dull conversations at top volume in public places. Here are two cell phone situations I hadn’t yet come across, and I am still a bit stunned. Will the madness never stop??

At the New England Mobile Book Fair, a venerable local institution, I looked forward to a quiet pee after a rather long drive to get there. Not to be. Not only was the bathroom totally stinky, but the person who was sitting on the pot stinking things up was also on a business call: “No, my understanding of this clause (plop) is that to interpret it properly (slight straining noise followed by plop) you have to consult the literature….” Etc.

As I was driving along in a neighboring town, on my way to pick up Owen from his piano lesson, I noticed a father and son pair walking along. I think, but cannot swear to it, that they were holding hands. In his other hand, the son was holding a cell phone, and talking on it seriously. The father was looking straight ahead with that distinctive I-know-I’m-superfluous-and-have-been-shoved-aside-for-something-so-much-more-important-but-I’m-really-ok-with-it embarrassed cell phone look. He was carrying his son’s school back pack. Did I mention the son looked to be about 8?

My poor Beau comes home on a regular basis moaning about living in the city, “But I don’t understand – why does anyone want to live here?” She lived for a long time in Vermont and can’t wait to get back there. She moved here for love of me and most of the time living with me and the boys outweighs her loss of easy access to the great outdoors.

What we have here is the lesser outdoors, although it can still be very exciting. Our across-the-street neighbor’s cat was killed by coyotes, for example. I see foxes, an unidentifiable fearsome creature who menaced me (perhaps a fisher cat), raccoons and skunks on my early morning walks (sadly on hiatus now because my back has gone Out and is taking its own sweet time returning), so there is a lot of nature drama, although not tracking deer through the early dawn forest (once there was a deer in my neighbor’s back yard, though, poor confused and hapless thing).

I don’t have any great love of the city so much. I’ll be glad to move back to Vermont with my Beau when the time comes and the boys have Flown the Nest. By then, cell phone reception will be UNIVERSAL. How joyous.

A Ranty Review of No Girls Allowed

I came upon this graphic collection of stories (as opposed to “graphic novel”) at the library, and quickly checked it out. I was thinking of some of the tomboys I know who could really do with a book like this. One little girl in particular was very interested in going to “Twelfth Night” because she heard the women dressed as men. She was disappointed with the whole thing, I heard; not quite what she’d hoped for, all that tittery het titillation. And No Girls Allowed: Tales of Daring Women Dressed as Men for Love, Freedom and Adventure written by Susan Hughes and illustrated by Willow Dawson, Kids Can Press, 2008, also disappoints.

The subjects of the stories are: Hatshepesut, Mu Lan, Alfhild, Esther Brandeau, James Barry, Ellen Craft, and Sarah Rosetta Wakeman.

Hatshepesut and James Barry are the only ones who don’t have love interest of the male persuasion – they don’t have no love interests at all, despite the fact that James Barry, for one, seems to me to have very probably been queer. The rest of them dress as men for various reasons, including helping to save their husbands (Ellen Craft impersonated a white slave owner to get herself and her husband up to the north and freedom) but end up getting together with men and being happy to don female weeds once more.

Let me ask the question I asked when I reviewed My Dog Tulip by J.A. Ackerley in a previous blog: In this day and age, can’t we expect a little more? Can’t we expect the queers to be seen and recognized? (Speaking of queers and dogs, here is a weird thing: James Barry always had a poodle, apparently, and always called it Psyche.)

For those little tomboys who are yearning to put on boys’ clothes and have adventures that don’t involve marrying men in the end? Maybe just one wee story? In a book about women dressing as men? Hello? I know nothing about James Barry (born Margaret Anne Buckley) other than what I just read in this book, but obviously she felt very comfortable in men’s clothing, was hugely ambitious (she became an incredibly renowned and popular doctor), and – I’m just guessing here – PROBABLY HAD A SEXUALITY!!! Now, there’s a concept. Surely someone knows something about this and just a little of her love life could have been included – the straight women’s love lives were front and center.

Ok, even if little to nothing is known about James other than his passion for poodles called Psyche, couldn’t the writer and illustrator have included just one story about a woman who dressed as a man because she was QUEER and it allowed her to get on with her life and marry the woman she loved? All I’m coming up with here is Patience and Sarah, who aren’t real people (only wonderful butch/femme characters from Isabel Miller’s fabulous novel, Patience and Sarah), but just because I’m blanking out on my queer history doesn’t mean there isn’t anybody.

If you got up the guts to check this book out, you little tomboys out there, you would get something, yes, but maybe not what you were really, subconsciously, looking for, not that potentially life-saving nod to how you imagine yourself as a grownup. And that is a real blow to your love, freedom and adventure; not at all what the book so earnestly set out to do. And BOY is that a shame!

This morning in Sunday school as part of a lesson about Jesus, Owen learned how to write “fuck” in Greek letters. Those wild and wacky UUs, doncha luvem?

Seth’s soccer game was called off due to lack of players due to Yom Kippur, but Owen’s game was on, and off he and my Beau went after church. The boys, may I say, look INCREDIBLY DAPPER in their very professional club soccer uniforms.

Seth and I hung out a little, then went to Whole Wallet to purchase some luxury food items because my Beau has ripped out the kitchen and we’re getting lovely new cabinets and etc., but it’s a few weeks of hell and washing dishes in the bathroom sink (ewww). Two thousand dollars later, we left, reeling, and I started singing “All Lost in the Supermarket” and saying to Seth how it’s the only Clash song I like, and then I brilliantly classified it as an “Eleanor Rigby” song because it’s about being out of step with the modern world (welcome to my life) and we came home and looked at it on youtube and there was a dumb one about a little boy lost in the supermarket and we disparaged it as made by someone without a clue. Then we watched “Apeman” by the Kinks and then I put on Iggy Pop’s “Party” on actual vinyl.

My Beau and Owen came back to report that Owen’s team won, 10 – 1, and that Owen made a beautiful goal. Owen went up and took a bath, the rest of us played with the puppy and put away groceries and fed the cats.

It’s raining.

We’re going to have early dinner in front of the TV and watch “Eerie, Indiana” which I cleverly ordered from the library after blogging about it a while back.

My Beau said the other day, “I feel so much better when the boys are here!” which both breaks my heart and fills my heart with deep peace and joy. I miss them so bad when they’re not here, and it is so amazing that I’ve found someone to be my love and their step-parent who they love and who loves them. It’s not easy being a step-parent, and my Beau is sometimes frustrated, but she is always completely honest and front-and-center and loving  and respectful with them.

Right now I can hear her in the other room talking about drugs and alcohol to the boys – they’ve both been hearing about this stuff at school in health class. She’s not talking down to them and she’s not dumbing it down, either, or sparing too many details. Never try crystal meth or crack. Period. Etc.

That’s it for my homey kinda boring Sunday blog. Cheery bye!

Lately, we’ve had Seth, our 13-year old, trapped in the car for commutes to his club soccer practice. It’s great! We make good use of this time, chatting in depth about the world of work, higher education, moral issues, and just last night, I went on at length about my dealings with AAA around a seriously shredded right rear tire. All very edifying!

The other day, though, Seth actually initiated a conversation thus:

“Mom, my geography teacher is gay – I mean, lesbian.”

Me: Oh, did she come out to you guys?

Seth: Huh?

Me: Did she tell you she’s gay?

Seth: Mom, come on. She wears lesbian clothes. You can tell. Everyone knows.

Me: (laughing and looking down at my jeans): What are lesbian clothes?

Seth: Come on, a pink shirt, you know, with a collar.

Me: How do you know that’s gay? I mean, maybe on a guy it would be.

Seth: No, mom, on a guy it’s cool, not gay. I have a friend who wears that and he looks cool.

Me: Maybe there’s something you don’t know about him.

Seth: MOM!!

Me: Well, honey, it sounds like you’ve developed some gaydar! I’m so proud of you!

(I explain about gaydar, to Seth’s amusement and horror. He denies he has anything gay.)

Seth: Anyway, she talked about her wife.

Me: Oh, well that’s a big clue.

Seth (having a sudden, terrifying thought): MOM!!! DON’T INVITE HER TO YOUR GAY PARTY!

Me (totally cracking up): You mean, go to the parent/teacher conference and say, “Hi! I’m Seth’s mom and I want YOU to come to my gay party!!!”

Seth (laughing but also completely horrified): MOM!!

Me: Don’t worry, baby. I am the soul of discretion.

Seth: Yeah, right. DON’T DO IT, MOM!!!

Me: Ok, ok.

So the gay parties he’s talking about is the potluck for the queer parents of the local elementary school that my Beau and I got going a few years ago. For the kids to get to know each other, and to offer each other support and camaraderie in the sometimes crazy (ok, usually crazy) mommy/daddy land of school.

It’s been great, the kids enjoy it for the most part (although Seth makes grumpy noises – he actually rather likes being hero worshipped by the little boys, who trail after him with their baseball gloves and stickball bats singing out his name in reverent tones), and the grown ups have formed friendships  and alliances, some more friendly than others, in the way of these things.

For the past year or two, a few of us have been trying to disseminate information to the other grade schools in town, reach out to all the queer-parent families here, and generally wanting to have a more solid town-wide connection to each other. It really seems to be going nowhere, though. This year, I wanted to have a booth at Town Day, but there was so little interest that I had to cancel. Another mom in the group says she thinks there’s just no need for this kind of networking/connection and that people are way too busy. I do think that people have their own support groups – families who have kids adopted from China, for example – but I still think there’s a deep need to have a town-wide presence of queer-parent families. I know how important it is for us, and we can’t be the only ones.

I was so sad when I had to cancel the Town Day booth that I had to cry on my Beau’s shoulder for several minutes. She patted me and said such nice things, like how I’ve kept the group going, how little steps are important, how I shouldn’t take it personally, all of which I heard and appreciate, but which didn’t stop me from wailing, “I just want things to be NIIIIIIIICE!!!” And I do. I want the queer-parent families in town to know each other. I want us to have a yearly (or more often) all-town gathering, like at the skating rink or the bowling alley, where we can get face recognition if nothing else and the kids can run around and never have to worry when another kid asks them about their family. And never have to hear “MY mom and dad, blah blah blah.” Because that is really, really important.

I just talked with my darling neighbor who is working as an aide up in the 1st grade at the local elementary school this year, and she said there are 3 lesbian-headed families in her class. One family I already know (the moms of Seth’s greatest little boy admirer), but the other two I don’t, and I’m so excited for our first school-year potluck because I really hope they’ll come. This is my family’s last year at the elementary school (Owen is in 5th grade, and Seth is already at the middle school, in 7th), so whether or not we ever get the town-wide thing going, we’re going to have to make some adjustments as more of our kids move on to other schools. I would love to:

make sure all the staff in all the schools are educated about queer-parent families

have a booth at Town Day next year

sponsor town-wide events such as a picnic, bowling, meeting at free skate, etc.

establish a regular drop-in where kids and parents could meet

investigate COLAGE (Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere) and think about starting a town branch

use the internet via a webpage, Facebook page, or other networking venue where we could communicate effectively and privately (no names of our kids, etc.)

establish a presence on the school committee

contact the local High School Gay Straight Alliance to see if there’s anything we could do for each other

make use of the town cable television

co-sponsor movies or discussions with the town’s Human Rights Commission

use the informational table in the town library

BUT…. probably, most likely, we’ll just go ahead and have a potluck in October, hope the new families will join us, get a good look at the kids who will surely have grown many feet and have interesting haircuts and tooth jewelry, drink a glass of wine with fellow travelers in the world of queer parenting, and laugh a lot.

That will be nice.