The Total Femme

Monday, Seth came in to the dining room where we were all sitting around after school, and announced that bats are the mammals who have the highest incidence of homosexual behavior (it turned out he’d been reading The Book Of Useless Information in the bathroom). I told him about penguins and that book about the two boy penguins who raise an egg. “Banned, I suppose?” he said in a worldly-wise tone.”  Then we talked about other birds and mammals who also exhibit homosexual behavior. “So, it’s natural – it’s in nature?” he said, completely stunned. I suppose he thought that Tex and I and Tracy (my ex*) and her partner had made up homosexuality explicitly to torture him.

That day, we had a family meeting about going to a production of a local youth theater troupe, True Colors, who put on plays about it’s ok to be Takei and every other form of how you express your love. This in celebration of a grant I wrote for the middle school GSA having been “unanimously and enthusiastically” granted in full by the town Education Foundation. Owen had been at the GSA that very day, and had had a blast. When I told them about the grant, Seth said, “Mom, you’re changing the world!” Later, Seth and Tex got to talking and Seth finalized the difficult decision to go with us last night to the play, sacrificing a baseball game. Which is NO SMALL SACRIFICE. We went out to eat first, and at the restaurant he asked me if I thought the play was going to be “super gay”. I told him that was the point.

So here’s the problem divorced straight people don’t have: the different ways of being gay. Tex and I are out all of the time, and we are proudly out, because not to be is too incredibly painful. We aren’t ashamed of being queer, we talk about being queer, we have queer things in the house, we are just darn queer queer queer all of the time. Tracy, on the other hand, while she is out, has great quantities of guilt and shame about being a lesbian, and she is completely unable to hide this fact from her children. And Seth picks right up on it. So when he’s here, he’s forced to go along for the ride – these are who his parent and step-parent are, they are queer, they are proud, and much of their lives revolve around queerness. Just like any other child, he has to live in the world of his parents; that is the way of things. But at Tracy’s, she’s always cutting him slack, “Oh, he just gets tired of all the gay gay gay, and he just wants to live a normal life.” Woah, mixed messages, right? Poor guy. Seriously, Owen just skips along, living on the love and not sweating the small stuff. Seth? Oof.

This morning Tex and I were talking about it, and she said we’ve just got to keep verbalizing it for Seth—for both boys. There are different ways of being gay. There are different kinds of gay people, just like there are different kinds of straight people. This of course, is good advice. But I’ve been wondering if I’m listening to Seth enough. The other thing Tex said this morning, resignedly, was, “Well, I guess Seth is really straight. I support and love him, and I guess I’ve known it all along, but it’s really coming into focus now.” She worries he’ll turn into a born again Christian or something to punish us for not being straight – he did ask us last night, before the play, why we’re gay. I guess I wouldn’t be surprised if he did something like that – for a while. He’s too nuanced and has too good a sense of humor to do it forever, though. That is my mother’s prayer. And he’s too caring of a person. His whole life he’s seen every member of his family work for the common good in their own quirky ways: his grandparents are teachers, I’m a teacher and agitator, Tex is an agitator, Tracy is a social worker, her partner is a doctor, and etc. We may be gay, but we want the world to be a better place for everybody. And I have to hope that even with Tracy’s anxiety and fear, that is the strongest message he’ll take away from his decidedly abnormal and completely normal upbringing.

*her pseudonym changes from post to post

Today, in the minivan (so much of what happens, happens in the minivan), Owen cracked open the coconut water drink he had asked me to buy for him at the health food store. It was disgusting, alas, and he hesitated not in the least to let us know. Seth said something inflammatory along the lines of, “You should have known it was gay!” And I said something like, “Yes, and I’m a gay coconut!” And Seth said, “You and Tex should wear coconuts on your heads.” I was puzzled, but then he reminded me of a recent cover of Lesbian Connection which he had happened upon in a stack of my belongings and which you can see here, in the upper left:

http://lconline.org/PastIssueCovers.aspx

Laughing so hard I almost drove off the road, I asked him if he thought maybe he had been scarred by that cover, and he allowed as how he probably had. And Owen, from the back seat, chimed in wearily, “There is so much to be scarred by, living in this family.”

1. Today he came home from school and said, a propos nothing, “Mom, I believe that gays should have equal rights.” (Any attempt to draw him out on the subject failed, but I’ll take it!)

2. I have to reach up to kiss his rather pimply cheek.

(This is the text of my part of the lay-led service at our UU church yesterday. Happy Valentine’s Day!)

I come from a long line of long-married people. We are so long-married that in the summer of 1980 my mother’s side of the family had a big celebration in the small Iowa town where her parents lived: One Hundred Years of Marriage. One Hundred years because that year my grandparents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, and both my mother and her sister celebrated their 25th. As the years went by, all four of my cousins went on to get married, and they remain married to this day. The paternal side of my family is just as tenacious: every single person over there got married once and by god stayed married (with the exception of just two unrepentant cousins). As I remarked to my cousin Birdie several years ago, this is a pretty hard act to follow (she has, though).

As a child, I imagined that I, too, would marry the perfect husband. The lives of my married relatives seemed to be just right, exactly as things should be. My parents’ marriage, in particular, was inspiring. Best friends, lovers, colleagues, partners in every aspect of life, from parenting to radical activism, my parents had each other’s backs. While friends’ parents were divorcing right and left, my parents stayed strongly and lovingly connected. They have now been married for 56 years.

Love and marriage featured prominently in the family stories I grew up hearing. My maternal grandmother, Mitzi, was teaching school, when she met my grandfather, Roland, who was a first generation Scandinavian stud. Too in love to wait for a more decorous and public wedding, they eloped and got married in Wahoo, Nebraska. Wahoo, Nebraska! I love that! Then they had to keep their marriage a secret because, at the time, schoolteachers were supposed to be single girls, “because if you were married,” my mother would tell me, “that would mean you were having carnal relations and were not fit to teach children.”

My paternal grandmother, Lulu Belle, was the prettiest girl in Taylor County, Iowa, having won the 1925 beauty contest at the age of 19; my grandfather, Allen, a sexy athlete with flaming red hair, the just-hired teacher and coach at the high school. They met at a baseball game when he walked right over and sat down next to her. He courted her in his new Buick coupe and they got married on my grandmother’s family farm. My parents were high school sweethearts who married outside in a forest glen, my mother wearing a dress her mother sewed for her. My aunt Cissy married Matt, an orphaned farm boy her parents had taken in out of the goodness of their hearts; My uncle George met his pretty, dark-haired wife, Garnet, when she was a beatnik in Berkeley; my cousin Birdie married a professional baseball player; my cousin Red married his sweetie in a romantic island-themed wedding, his flaming red hair looking a lot like his grandpa’s.

As for me, by the time I’d made it to college, I had decided not to get married. I was a fierce feminist, I questioned the institution of marriage (along with every other institution), and although I was dating men, I was beginning to have doubts about my sexuality. It took another 15 years, however, for me to understand that I was not straight, and by the time I met my spouse, Tex, I was in my 40s. In June, we’ll celebrate our first wedding anniversary.

Tex and I have a romantic story: we met online, in the modern fashion. I answered her personal ad and she almost didn’t write back because my personal ad didn’t have a picture. (At the time, I didn’t know how to put a picture on the computer.) We were both newly single and both swore up one side and down the other that we just wanted to date and have fun, but the first time we talked on the phone, I thought to myself, “She is the marrying kind,” and promptly started to fall in love with her. Tex remembers the lovely calm feel to our first dates, a quiet, subtle sweetness, she says, that seeped into her heart over time. We sustained a long-distance relationship for over five years until finally moving in together; we had our wedding here in town at our UU at First Parish, the first couple to be married by the new minister.

This Valentine’s Day gay and lesbian couples all over the country are taking part in gentle acts of disobedience: going into their local city and town halls to request marriage licenses. This is part of the annual Marriage Equality USA tradition, where February is Freedom to Marry month, and these actions are done in the hopes of raising awareness and educating the public about the importance of securing the right to marry for all of us. (And, in a side note, those of us lucky enough to be legally married in Connecticut, Iowa Washington DC, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont are being encouraged to take our marriage licenses to our local Federal Building IRS office and ask for the marriage tax penalty.) Same-sex marriage is still so new – legal same sex marriage, that is. We have always found each other, always pledged our hearts and lives to each other; it’s only the public and legal aspect that is beginning to change, though that is no small matter.

Being married has been a revelation to me. When you say, “I’m married,” everybody knows what it means – who Tex and I we are to each other – and it is sweet indeed to finally begin to experience what so many have taken for granted for so long. Being married, that mundane miracle we all recognize, has freed my love and I to concentrate on our family and our relationship rather than using energy constantly having to fight for inclusion in this most human of ventures. Books and treatises on marriage, acts I’ve witnessed in friends’ and family members’ lives, make sense to me now in ways I didn’t even realize I was missing, as I begin to understand the blessings, hard work, surprises, challenges and joys that make up a lovingly married couple’s life. And Tex assures me that we can aspire to be married quite as long as all those other long-married folks I’ve spoken about – just because we didn’t start in our 20s doesn’t mean that we don’t have plenty of time! Of course, how much time we’ve got is part of the big mystery, but I do know one thing:

It feels damn good to finally take my place as part of the family.

Friday after school, I forced Seth* to go clothes shopping with me, as there were a couple of alarming items** I saw on his texts that I wanted to discuss (parent of teen hint #72: trap them in the car). So we discussed. He grunted, said, “I dunno,” and “No,” and “Muh.” I gesticulated and lectured and used big words that I had to define, which I guess I tend to do when somewhat agitated. Rather than blowing his top, as he is wont to do, he just got more and more…mellow. Slouched down in his seat, pretended great uninterest, gazed serenely out the window. And said mean things about how everyone at school hates lesbians and why do I have to be such a lesbian, and no offense, mom, I’m just saying, everyone hates lesbians. Which hurt my feelings and I wasn’t going to pretend that it didn’t, and  prompted me to go on a rant about how I live my life as an out queer and that means I’m true to myself.

Hurt my feelings, yes, but didn’t detract me from the main issues, which I persisted in coming back to. I think he was listening…

We went shopping and purchased numerous voluminous items of clothing (it hurts my husband’s dapper heart, bless her, that Seth goes around looking like a sloppy white homey).

On the way home, I asked Seth how he’s doing in general and what his plans are for himself. “My plans for myself?” he asked incredulously. “Yes,” I answered patiently. “Well, first I’m going to finish middle school,” he began. “Then I’m going to go to high school, graduate, go to a good college, become a professional baseball player, basketball player, and soccer player, retire, buy 3 mansions, and give a lot of money to charity, to Go Gays.”

“Who are they?!”

“They’re a charity I started.”

“With all the money you made playing sports?”

“Yep.”

You might not know it, but this constitutes a heartfelt and loving apology in the world of Seth.

I’ll take it!

*aka: “I’m 14, But Could You Please Treat Me Like I’m 24?”

**never you mind, but I’m sure you can imagine – as I said to Seth another time I trapped him in the car, “I know you’re dealing with many things including: drugs, sex, shoplifting, drinking, and fighting,” and I was right, too.

So pretty much since the beginning of the school year, I’ve been in quite a go-around with Seth and Owen’s middle school about starting a GSA. The principal early on told me that yes yes yes we want a GSA and go see this guidance counselor, who is interested in running the thing. The guidance counselor is a first-year staff member, very enthusiastic, ready to go, but is stymied by the small matter of there not being a stipend for the club, and her union won’t allow her to volunteer her time after school. Back to the principal, who gives me mixed messages, saying things like, “I’ll find the money!” “We have the money!” but secretly believing (as far as I can tell) that the guidance counselor should just buck the union rules and volunteer her time. As a result, not only is the stipend not forthcoming, but the principal bruits around that the guidance counselor is young and untried and quite overwhelmed by her job, so, gosh he worries that she won’t be able to handle starting the club. Which makes the guidance counselor furious, since she’s been bringing this up every week at their meetings, saying very clearly, “I am ready to start. Get me the stipend.” Other players in this drama are a school committee member who I’m friendly with, the kids at the high school GSA who have been trying to get the middle school GSA going since last year, and in fact, went over to the middle school and bearded the principal in his den (to no avail, so far), and various parents and middle school kids. I just talked with the guidance counselor today who is feeling VERY FRUSTRATED and just wishes the principal would be honest with her – if there really isn’t money this year, can we get the promise to earmark money next year? Also, she’s unhappy that he keeps attaching her name to this whole thing, making her into the fall guy, when the entire guidance department is behind the GSA, will, in fact, probably all contribute, and it’s up to the principal, not the guidance counselor, to cough up the stipend.

I’ve written a letter to the editor of the local paper (cc’ing the principal and the superintendent), I’ve informally encouraged other concerned parents to contact the principal, I’ve talked with the school committee member who says he’ll follow up, and every time the PTO has a meeting (I’m the self-appointed LGBT Coordinator, intrepid parent voluteer) I ask about the errant stipend once more.

I know the principal has about 8 million things on his plate, including very nasty budget cuts looming in the near future. On the other hand, this is something he says he wants, and a middle school GSA is imperative – a sanity saver, a life saver. There is no question about that. The guidance counselor says the principal is a yes man who spreads himself too thin, makes promises he can’t necessarily keep, and wants everyone to be happy . To which Seth, when I was telling him about this, asked, “Even the neo-Nazis?” Maybe not them. But a yes man can be a difficult creature to deal with, and I’m feeling a little out on a limb here. Next on the agenda is a mass email to a bunch of parents I think will care, giving them step by step instructions on how to contact the principal in order to show that the GSA has a lot of parental support. I have a feeling that if we just keep pushing, he’s going to have to cough up the stipend, but it’s a long haul, I tell you, and it’s very tricky – am I dealing with a lot of homophobia, or just incompetence, or both or what?

These days, I find myself opening my big gay mouth a lot. I find myself somewhat involved in politics. I find myself doing community activism. These are all things I never really thought I would be doing, but here I am, doing them. It doesn’t come exactly easily, but it feels pretty good. And I find myself engaged and interested, even though it’s frustrating and can feel odd, out there on a limb, all by myself. Calling things out that other people don’t much seem to notice or care about. Are there enough LGBTQ books in the middle school library, in the town library? Why does this town still have an Indian mascot? What’s the deal with the beloved town tradition of doing “Colonial Days” in all the grade schools, where kids dress up in colonial garb and no mention is made of the Indians who were already living here? Don’t all the queers living here want to have a more coherent community so we can, say, have an organized response to things effecting queers, like when those nutjobs from that Kansas Baptist church were going to come picket a production of “The Laramie Project” or right now, when the middle school needs a GSA? These and many other niggling questions and observations occupy my mind, and along with writing (I’m a writer, used to sitting around thinking all by myself) I find myself wanting to push a little, engage a little, see what can be changed.

Maya Angelou said, “If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities,” a quote I find extremely inspiring, especially since I’m not aiming for a million – just a few townies would do.

When I was a girl, my father had a large library of piano music. Every day, he would choose one or two pieces to sight read, getting great satisfaction out of what he perceived of as a rescue operation. He imagined that no one had played these hoary old tunes for years and years, and he was doing them a service by allowing them to give voice once more.

I like to rescue things, too. I like to hold on to things. On any given flat surface in our house (windowsill, end table, refrigerator door) there are rescued things – or rather, things I like to look at, that remind me of this or that. I’ve got a blue plastic toy motorcycle on my windowsill that was Tex’s when she was a boy, right next to a shiny red rock I got after Seth’s birth, to remind me how brave I was. Owen’s art work from preschool — a star mobile — hangs in my study (he’s in 6th grade).  My metal file cabinet has a postcard of two stroppy gals advertising a local roller derby, along with a sign I liberated from a telephone pole that says NO PARKING AT ANYTIME (see my post of the same name for more on that). Said file cabinet is full of files of wonderful things, too – I tell ya! I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

The other day, I finally had a little time and energy to go through a huge stack of clippings, many still in the original envelopes. These are clippings my parents send me at quite a brisk clip – as my mother penned on a sticky in one envelope, “Your clipping service never sleeps!” I do try to OHIO (Only Handle It Once – a useful concept I learned from a book about adult ADD), but when I don’t, they go in a pile. I don’t like to toss them unread, as I love my parents and in this age of no more letters, getting something in the snail mail is a treat; plus, I usually enjoy the read, as my parents and I share a love for the unexpected, the odd, the ironic, the marvelous, the animal story. In this particular stack, there were many wonderful things, although I did get a little tired of articles warning about cell phone use, a particular horror of my father’s. More entertaining were: a picture of an intrepid and plucky seal plundering fish from a fish farm, having traveled a great distance over land and crossed several roads to get there; an Idaho Rottweiler who adopted a baby sheep whose mother had rejected it; a couple of articles about men attempting balloon chair flight (one of which ended badly); a story about the Iroquois team and the World Lacrosse Championships; a stern op-ed by Joyce Chicoine entitled “Hard times are nothing new for seniors” telling people to stop whining and offering teaching stories like this one, “Building a raft and floating down the river was a big adventure. Playing softball in a neighbor’s yard was common and swimming in an irrigation ditch provided a bit of excitement. We had an old Chevrolet car that took us to town once a week where we would do our shopping and stop by the local café for a piece of pie or buy an ice cream cone at the local drugstore. Somehow, we found ways to have fun without needing a lot of money”; the story of a trucker who lost her dog at a truck stop and many weeks later was reunited with her thanks to the efforts of a sympathetic local woman who baited traps with “the strongest, stinkingest smoked meat” available; an article about the inventor of the game Anti-Monopoly and his lifelong fight with Hasbro and a letter from a woman thanking the Wall Street Journal for their article about cilantro (boy, do some people hate it! my mother and Seth included); an article about Ansel Adams having taken pictures at Manzanar, the Japanese internment camp in California, now a National Historic Site.

People, there are untold millions of wonderful things in this world! I love knowing about them, which is why I really have to limit myself on the internet in this day of extreme informational overload, especially since I  have this crazy desire to hold on to these things, put them on display, somehow honor them. But my penchant/curse/blessing/talent for wanting to hold and treasure them all (I do! I really do!), archive them for some unknown audience (the boys? a future archeologist? a scholar who will find me because he/she is looking for exactly what I have collected on my windowsill and I will be vindicated once and for all, damn all of you who said it was clutter?) severely drains my creative energy. While I’m slowly filling the house up with crumbling clippings, for example, the people in those clippings have surely gone on to do ever more wonderful things, and I’m at a standstill. Rather than hold all of them close to me, I am so much happier when I find a way to let them fly, fly, fly so I can make room for my own creative work.

I therefore take this blog moment to formally acknowledge the infinite and glorious people, events, animals, and teaching stories filling this world, and pledge to try, try, try to love them and let them go so that I can do what I need to do to add to the wonder.

Except for clippings.

Monday night was the MLK Day program in our town, here outside of Boston. Tex and I went on our own, as Seth and Owen were with Sarah* in Vermont, skiing and snowboarding. Last year, the boys were with us, and we ended up writing a letter to the minister at our UU church because not only was she out of town on MLK weekend, her fill-in gave a sermon on local food – no mention at all of civil rights, or MLK. We were all so shocked that we came home and wrote her a letter, which she subsequently read in church, promising that next MLK Day she would not fall prey to such an oversight again. Sure enough, she preached a rip-snorter last Sunday, and, as we told the boys, that was partly because we took the time to say something to her. It was our MLK Day action.

At any rate, Tex and I were feeling good, having come home from church on Sunday to do another MLK Day civil action by brainstorming about and researching ways to support the LGBT members of the congregation, something we’ve been wanting to do for a while. So when we walked into Town Hall Monday for the MLK Day program, we were fired up. Being confronted by a phalanx of boy scouts in uniform drew us up short, as you can perhaps imagine. That was number one.

Number two was that, as we were sitting waiting for things to begin, after having reluctantly parted with our corn muffins (the boy scouts took them off us because they were setting up the food tables), the mistress of ceremonies kept peering at Tex, trying to read her name tag. Tex finally went over to her to see what she wanted, then came back with a bemused expression on her face saying, “She thought I was ‘one of the young men’ they’re going to honor tonight.” Later, we learned that the young man in question is a high school boy who has done a lot of work researching players from the Negro Leagues, with the result that some of them were awarded long overdue pensions. Very inspiring and impressive work, but Tex is neither 16 nor male.

Number three: When the featured speaker was introduced, the man doing the introduction made a big deal about “a black president thanking a Latino man who had helped a white Jewish woman”, obviously believing that he’d covered all the civil rights bases. Gay! Gay! I felt like shouting out, and I actually did whisper it and then I told my neighbor that Daniel Hernandez is gay – news to her.

Oh, and I guess there’s a number four, because as far as we could tell, we were just about the only queers there – of course, you can’t be certain, but none of the queers from church were there (there was a pretty big contingent of people from church), nor any of our fellow queer parents, nor any of the queers we know from around town.

It was just deflating, is the thing. As Tex said, “You start to feel safe, you’re going to a civil rights celebration, and then you realize you’re not really included. It hurts.” It does hurt, and I am always astounded that connections being made between discriminations are still so far and few between.

Then we got to talking about Dr. King and would he have liked us. We have to assume yes, but we know it’s iffy. Here’s what makes me think yes, from his speech denouncing the Vietnam War which I heard on the radio on Sunday (“A Time to Break Silence”, April 4, 1967):

“Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.”

If he can make that connection – over the protests of a lot of people he called colleagues – then I can only hope he would have embraced the civil rights struggles of queers as well, since he very clearly saw the world in which we live. The flavor of our battles might be different and NO, gay is not the new black, but all downtrodden people can learn from each other’s hopes, dreams, and strategies, and together we are stronger and will go so much further.

I can’t wait to see what our family’s next MLK Day action will be; the boys will be with us and there is no telling what we might get up to. Oh, wait, I forgot: EVERY DAY IS MLK DAY!! In the spirit of passionate, intelligent resistance to bigotry of all kinds, may you – may all of us – stay true to ourselves, which is, in and of itself, a powerful force in the world. Amen!

*my ex, called by whatever name comes to mind as I write

My butch husband now has a pseudonym: Tex. This is because our next story requires that she have a name. Ok: two nights ago, Seth was faffing around, postponing getting into bed by various methods, mostly having to do with sorting through his Magic cards. Then he asked if he could take a bath. I said ok, but told him to ask Tex if she needed to get into the bathroom first. He looked up at me with an innocent expression,

“Could you, Mom?”

“No.” I started walking out of the room – he’s always trying to get out of doing things, the original Mr. No we call him.

“But Mom, wait.” He still had the innocent expression, frowning just a bit. I had turned back and was looking at him perplexedly. He continued, “To tell you the truth, Mom, I’m a little bit scared of her. I mean, is she a girl or a boy?”

At this point I was scoffing and laughing at the same time and I really did leave the room and he went down to ask her about the bathroom, also laughing.

Last night at dinner I suddenly remembered Seth’s joke and related it to the whole table, and we all had a good chuckle. “Mean, scary Tex!” said Tex, who often remarks that she’s the evil step parent. “I’m a girl who is like unto a boy.”

“That sounds like a song!” said Owen, and immediately the two of them started singing, “Mean, scary Tex!” and then Tex added, “Who is like unto a boy!” and then I added, “Stay out of her way, stay out of her way, stay out of her way – she will steal your joy!”

We were all cracking up. It was one of those moments where everybody is completely at ease with who we are, like that wonderful scene in “The Kids Are All Right” when the sister, on her way off to college, says to the brother something like, “I’m sorry to leave you with the moms…”

Even just a year ago, Seth was feeling completely put upon by our queerness, and here he is, joking around. I can’t say I don’t miss his babyhood, the curls, the serious expression on his fat little toddler face, the sweet way he spoke in his little boy voice, but people, I am loving seeing him come into his manself, his sense of humor, the way he’s starting to feel more at ease in the world.

We are a queer family. We are a happy family – like and unlike any other. And as I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this blog, I am one lucky mama.

The regular reader of this blog, and I believe there is at least one of you, will know that I am divorced from my ex, Stephanie* and that we share custody of our sons, Seth (14) and Owen (11).

Yesterday, I was waiting at church for Owen to finish rehearsal with the children’s choir. I was rather blissfully engaged in writing an actual letter on an actual card, something I’ve been allowing myself to do lately, when Stephanie appeared, looming over me, beckoning me back out into the foyer so we could talk. Urg. But I went. (We belong to the same local UU church, which is not always the easiest thing, but it’s pretty much worked out so far, and it’s a very good thing for the boys.)

Now I can’t even remember what she wanted – she prefers talking in person about minutiae that I prefer to ignore or address via email. The thing is, the longer we talked, the more irritated I got, and the more irritated I got, the more I copped a ‘tude. I didn’t notice it at the time, all I noticed was how irritated she makes me, but once we were done and I went back to my seat, thoroughly out of the letter-writing mood, I had a sudden picture of myself out there. Maybe this is because one of the church ladies, who had been bustling about, passed us several times, and smiled warmly at me every time – she was seeing us and I was seeing her seeing us. Seeing me. Maybe it was because that morning’s sermon had been a good one. I don’t know, but I got it, all at once, what a fucked up attitude I have with Stephanie. I could see myself in my mind, standing at a remove, a distasteful expression on my face, speaking probably more loudly than necessary, waiting impatiently for her to finish or even interrupting so I could make my point, without really listening or giving her ideas any consideration. Talking down to her from my position as a superior parent, one who is more thoughtful, warmer, more understanding of the boys’ needs and desires, and really, an all around better person. Fuck! I thought to myself. No wonder she doesn’t listen to me!

Many people will tell you that Stephanie is a difficult person, even people who get along with her will tell you that. For various and complicated reasons, she has her own problems listening, she’s got severe control issues, she’s highly anxious and chronically unable to see the world from any other viewpoint than her own quite narrow one. With our history, it can be nigh on impossible for me to treat her firmly but respectfully, making sure I stick to very rigid boundaries and do not become emotional, which is the absolute best way to deal with her. It’s hard because she drives me crazy and I absolutely believe that I do know what’s best for the boys and I am the superior parent, BUT she is not an evil person. Fucked up, yes. Evil, no. And she was once a little girl who dressed up to go to a tea party at her Aunt Mary’s house (I used to display the photo; she has it now), a little girl who stayed late at school with sympathetic teachers because it was so hellish at home. Not to mention that we hold between us the precious lives of our babies, who love her and need her. The result of me knowing these things about her is that if I am not EVER VIGILANT, POTTER, EVER VIGILANT#, I get into this vicious cycle of being nice to her because I remember the former and then screeching to a sickening halt and copping that extremely unsavory superior parent/you’re a blithering idiot attitude when she uses my being nice to her as an excuse to practically move back into the house with me.

Ok, but the ‘tude is gross. It keeps me from paying attention, from being the kind of person I want to be, from spreading kindness instead of grumpiness. Here I am, trying to be wise and spiritual and calm (I do devotional reading every morning! I exercise! I work hard!), wanting to give the boys a good example of how to be a grown up, wanting our home to be a refuge and a source of happiness, really thinking a lot about what it means to be human as I start this very last year of my 40s, and I’m standing around in the church foyer where all the church people can see me being a complete fuckhead to my ex? Oh dearie me.

I guess, in the way of these things, by the time I get my degree in the extremely complicated art of Being Divorced From Stephanie, the boys will be off on their own and I won’t have to talk with her but a couple times a year. Well, some people train to be Buddhist monks, some people deal with very difficult divorces with as much grace as possible. And I haven’t been very graceful lately. I really really need to work on not being such an asshole to her – the boys need me to, and Stephanie needs me to, and all of us are important. You are my witness: I’m copping to that.

*her name changes from post to post

#a la Mad Eye Moody in the Harry Potter books