What's Hecuba to Him, or He to Hecuba?

Raider and I have an especially beloved friend; the kids call him Uncle Toots. We have a long history with Toots. Raider and Toots can remember the night they met as college students; they quickly became best friends and, sometimes, lovers. They have so much in common and have been through so much together that we joke that they are the same person; indeed, once when they were young, someone seeing them together at an event did a double-take: this person, knowing them separately, had thought they were one person. (First aside: sometime even I confuse them. One time I said to Raider, "I made a stir-fry for dinner, but I didn't put in any ginger because I know you don't like it." Raider said, "I like ginger. Toots doesn't like ginger.")

I moved to town a few years later and met Toots on our first day working at the same place. We fell in love. I didn't get to know Raider well over the next couple of years, because he was back and forth to North Dakota caring for his parents, but I remember the night I met Raider: he and Toots lived together, and I met Raider when I picked Toots up for our first date. Until Toots and I got an apartment together, there was a room across the hall from his that belonged to Raider; I saw his stuff, I even slept in his bed a time or two, before I got to know him.

Toots and I stopped being lover-lovers after awhile. Two years? I can't remember exactly. But we had this weird inertia--we knew that one of us should move out of the apartment, but somehow we never could bring ourselves to do it. And, after awhile, we found that we had transitioned to a new relationship, something more than friends and other than lovers, although we were still occaionally "lovers" in the technical sense, as were Toots and Raider, once in a blue moon. This was the beginning of our having a relationship there is no name for. (Second aside: I've been re-thinking the expression "break up," because I have had so many relationships with lovers that didn't end, but rather turned into something else. Sometimes that transition is painful; sometimes it's not. But in the long run, it often turns out that nothing was broken.)

Raider's parents died within a few months of each other when he was 25. (Third aside: now that many of my friends and I are beginning to deal with parents who are aging, I have a new sympathy for what it must have been like for him, as an only child, to go through that so young.)

A few months after his mother died, Raider came back to Michigan, to continue work on a library science degree at Michigan. He had a tiny single on North Campus, but during this time of intense grieving, what he needed was to be with his other half, and day after day he would finish classes and drive the hour to our house so he could be with Toots. This is when Raider and I began to know each other; and we got even closer when we decided that it made more sense for him to live with us and commute to school the next semester.

In the years since then, Toots and Raider and I have lived together and apart in a variety of configurations. We all lived together for awhile, then Raider got his own house and Toots lit out for San Francisco. Then Raider and I moved in together. Then some malignant idiot ran a red light and nearly killed Toots, and he came back to Michigan to recuperate while his multiple broken limbs healed. He ended up staying, and we lived together after that for, what, four or five years? Until the Lego Savant was about 18 months old anyway. If Toots comes back to Michigan someday--as he may, to be near his own aging parents, and us--we will most likely live together again.

When the Lego Savant was a toddler, Toots moved to Boston to be with his sweetie, the Crafty Elf. We can tolerate this separation only because we love the Crafty Elf so very much. And we spent some time seriously considering whether we should move to Boston, too.

My point is: What is Toots to us? What are we to Toots? The kids call him Uncle, but we could just as easily have decided to call him Papa Toots; he is the closest thing they have to a third parent. I sometimes tell people that they might think of Toots as the third adult in our nuclear family, even though he lives with the Crafty Elf these days. Toots sometimes tries to convey his relationship with the children by telling people he is their godfather; that works pretty well. Sometimes he takes flack from his family for spending more time with our kids than with his biological nephew; would it help people understand the relationship and accept it if we had decided to call him their stepfather?

I remember one night when I was pregnant with the Lego Savant. I was very sick, as usual. Raider had tucked me into bed early, and he and Toots were next door in Toots' bedroom watching ST:TNG. I lay there listening to them talk and laugh, and I could feel their intimacy and love for one another, and I felt so warmed by it. Their connection gave me tremendous pleasure. It still does.

Recently, Toots was visiting, and we were hanging out in the living room after the kids had gone to bed. I was crocheting in my big chair, and drifted out of the conversation a little bit, listening to them talk, and it occurred to me: in some ways, Raider is closer to Toots than he is to me. In important ways. I am non-optional for Raider. But so is Toots. I miss Toots when we don't see him often enough; Raider feels his absence profoundly much of the time.

This gets me thinking: are we polyamorous with Toots? Neither of us has had a sexual relationship with Toots in a very long time, but why do we so often use sex to define relationships? Heck, you don't need intimate details of my relationship with Raider to guess that, between two terrible pregnancies, a lifetime of chronic pain, extended illness, and the normal pressures of having young children, we have had some long stretches when sex was a happy memory and a longed-for future. If our relationship had to be redefined every time we went a certain number of weeks or months without sex, we'd have been married, unmarried, married, unmarried, married, and unmarried many times over the past 19 years. (Fourth aside: a new euphemism. "Hey, Raider: Will you marry met? Marry me hard!")

The only thing I know for sure is: this is one of the ways that family looks in our lives.

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