When Quakers are going on and on about way opening, my friend Sally will sometimes remind us that a clear No is as useful as a clear Yes. Sometimes even moreso. I have been thinking about Sally's words a fair bit lately.
My mom died two days before Thanksgiving, after a short stay in the ICU. It wasn't entirely unexpected; she had intractable heart problems and we'd known for awhile that one of these days she'd take a turn for the worse and not turn back. Those days in the ICU were a rollercoaster of family drama, both good and bad. On the one hand, my always-sensitive dad took the opportunity to tell me once again, as we stood by my mother's bed together, what a disappointment I'd been to him. On the other hand, my brother and I had a late-night conversation in the hospital cafeteria that was the most honest, intimate, and hilarious talk we'd ever had--a hint of what might have been if we'd grown up together in a different family.
Ever since the doctors told us a couple of years ago that there was nothing more that could be done for my mother's heart, I've been wondering how things would end for us. There are some questions I've carried my whole life: Will my mother ever say she loves me? Will she ever suggest that she is pleased with me, or proud, or even simply, for heaven's sake, approves of me? Will she ever get interested in my life and who I am?
The answer to these questions, it turns out, is No.
That's not the answer I wanted. I never could stop hoping. Since she died, I have been alternately (and sometimes at the same time) hurt, sad, angry, grieved. But I have also been relieved. Those questions, that futile hope, have been a heavy thing to carry and I've been carrying them for almost fifty years. It is, in its way, a gift to be able to set them down at last.
My brother and sister-in-law hosted the remains of the family for lunch on Christmas Eve. At this lunch, my father told me that if we didn't stop treating the Tiny Tornado as a boy, he wanted nothing more to do with me. I'd have gotten up and left right then, but the kids weren't in the room when it happened; they were having a wonderful time with their cousins, and they wanted to stay to open presents. So I cried in the bathroom for awhile, soldiered through, and left as soon as the gifts were unwrapped. "If you change your mind," I told my dad, "give me a call."
My time sense is all distorted; I can't believe that was only five days ago. I spent one day profoundly hurt; one day righteously angry; and then I woke up on the third day and realized that this, too, is a relief. My father has always been rigid, judgmental, cold. He believes that there is one right way to do things; this is, of course, his way. As recently as this summer, when I was forty-six years old, he was still trying to tell me how to live my life. One of the hard questions I've been carrying has been how I would have a relationship with him after my mother's death, since my mother has always been the mediator and the social glue in our little clan.
I have tried so hard for so long to improve my relationship with my parents. I've done it by lowering my expectations; by practicing compassion; by trying to appreciate what they were able to give me even when it fell far short of what I wanted and needed from them. With both my parents, I have struggled with how to love people who don't want to be loved, how to win the approval of people who will never give it. I've treasured crumbs; I've been wronged and I've forgiven, only to be wronged again; I've cried on Raider's shoulder; I've been foolishly optimistic and let myself be disappointed again and again. I have prayed, consulted wise loved ones, looked for hints about how to be a good daughter to my father once my mother was gone.
My father, bless him, has freed me of this burden.
What I have written may sound self-pitying. I don't mean it to. I'm not feeling that way. But I don't see any reason to pretend my parents were other than they were. In many ways, they failed me--and my brother--from the very beginning. I miss my mom very much. I loved her very much. I treasured many things about her.
But I am better off without her. As for my dad--I wish him well. I would have loved him if he had let me.
Saturday, December 29, 2012
Sunday, December 9, 2012
LYSF: The Heart is the Strongest Muscle in the Body
I realize that the post I put up the other day on New Relationship Energy made it sound like I think relationships can only be in two modes: Somebody Is Changing mode, in which case the relationship is doomed; or Hunkered in the Bunker mode, in which case the couple clings fearfully to a dry, joyless routine, the safe but sterile fossilized remains of the vibrant love they once enjoyed.
Ha! Of course this is not true. Every relationship incorporates change over its lifetime. Sometimes the changes are challenging, the process of adapting to them requires a tremendous amound of hard work, and a successful outcome--if by "successful" we mean "the relationship continues"--is by no means assured. Other times, they're relatively easy to accommodate. Sometimes we initiate the changes--I go back to school to study Speech Language Pathology, and Raider takes up a few of my household chores and becomes responsible for dinner most nights. Other times, the changes are forced on us: someone's health declines, or a job is lost, or a child is more challenging that we expected.
My point is that this is another thing we have in common: relationships are strong and flexible, and they stretch and bend to accommodate the change that is a constant in life. I have more than one set of friends who got together as teenagers--or, in the case of one of my cousins, at the age of 12--with a partner they have now been with for 20, 30, or 40 years. I haven't had much opportunity to listen to these couples talk about how they navigated the transition to adulthood together, but I know they did it. When I think about all the changes I went through in my self-understanding and my behavior between the ages of 17 and 27, these relationships astonish me (though I know that some of these folks, at least, were generally more stable people than me from a young age). They made it through college together; grad school in some cases; the establishment of careers; the arrival of children (and in the case of my cousin, grandchildren); interstate moves. They've had triumphs and disappointments. And somehow they are still together, and in happy, healthy relationships.
If the idea of someone in a long-term relationship dating outside that relationship seems inconceivable to you, maybe it will help if you consider that every relationship has to stretch to accommodate the people in it. What is an easy accommodation for one--"sure, I'll move to Guam with you!"--is impossible for someone else--"I've been playing D&D with the same people every Saturday night for 20 years. There's no way I'm moving out of town!" It may be impossible for you to imagine being untroubled by your partner wanting to find someone to play with at the conference they're going to next weekend, but some people's honest reaction is, "Have a great time, honey. Take condoms. I think I'll spend the weekend marathoning that TV show you don't like."
My point is that your relationship may not stretch to encompass this particular kind of new thing but I am absolutely sure it has stretched to accommodate others. You've supported your partner through the monomania of finishing a dissertation, or through training for a marathon, or through their new obsession with keeping backyard poultry. You've spent a year in couple's therapy to overcome bad patterns, or one of you has finally entered treatment for an old anxiety or depressive disorder.
"That's not the same!" you may say. "Sex is in its own category! Romance is a separate thing!" Maybe. I know that for a lot of people that's true. But it's not true for me. For me, dating is just another example of the many things that our relationship is big enough to hold. I think that everyone who is in a relationship will at some point come up against the question of "Is our relationship big enough and strong enough for this?"
I tell you, this is another thing we have in common.
Upcoming: "Just What Did I Learn The Hard Way, and How Did I Learn It?" and "Is a Relationship a Failure if it Ends?"
Ha! Of course this is not true. Every relationship incorporates change over its lifetime. Sometimes the changes are challenging, the process of adapting to them requires a tremendous amound of hard work, and a successful outcome--if by "successful" we mean "the relationship continues"--is by no means assured. Other times, they're relatively easy to accommodate. Sometimes we initiate the changes--I go back to school to study Speech Language Pathology, and Raider takes up a few of my household chores and becomes responsible for dinner most nights. Other times, the changes are forced on us: someone's health declines, or a job is lost, or a child is more challenging that we expected.
My point is that this is another thing we have in common: relationships are strong and flexible, and they stretch and bend to accommodate the change that is a constant in life. I have more than one set of friends who got together as teenagers--or, in the case of one of my cousins, at the age of 12--with a partner they have now been with for 20, 30, or 40 years. I haven't had much opportunity to listen to these couples talk about how they navigated the transition to adulthood together, but I know they did it. When I think about all the changes I went through in my self-understanding and my behavior between the ages of 17 and 27, these relationships astonish me (though I know that some of these folks, at least, were generally more stable people than me from a young age). They made it through college together; grad school in some cases; the establishment of careers; the arrival of children (and in the case of my cousin, grandchildren); interstate moves. They've had triumphs and disappointments. And somehow they are still together, and in happy, healthy relationships.
If the idea of someone in a long-term relationship dating outside that relationship seems inconceivable to you, maybe it will help if you consider that every relationship has to stretch to accommodate the people in it. What is an easy accommodation for one--"sure, I'll move to Guam with you!"--is impossible for someone else--"I've been playing D&D with the same people every Saturday night for 20 years. There's no way I'm moving out of town!" It may be impossible for you to imagine being untroubled by your partner wanting to find someone to play with at the conference they're going to next weekend, but some people's honest reaction is, "Have a great time, honey. Take condoms. I think I'll spend the weekend marathoning that TV show you don't like."
My point is that your relationship may not stretch to encompass this particular kind of new thing but I am absolutely sure it has stretched to accommodate others. You've supported your partner through the monomania of finishing a dissertation, or through training for a marathon, or through their new obsession with keeping backyard poultry. You've spent a year in couple's therapy to overcome bad patterns, or one of you has finally entered treatment for an old anxiety or depressive disorder.
"That's not the same!" you may say. "Sex is in its own category! Romance is a separate thing!" Maybe. I know that for a lot of people that's true. But it's not true for me. For me, dating is just another example of the many things that our relationship is big enough to hold. I think that everyone who is in a relationship will at some point come up against the question of "Is our relationship big enough and strong enough for this?"
I tell you, this is another thing we have in common.
Upcoming: "Just What Did I Learn The Hard Way, and How Did I Learn It?" and "Is a Relationship a Failure if it Ends?"
Posted with BlogsyFriday, December 7, 2012
Loving Your Slutty Friend: New Anything Energy
Yesterday, I joked that I was going to write a pamphlet that would focus on reassuring the vanilla and monogamous by focusing on what we have in common. Today I find myself thinking about one of those things.
A quick note about terminology: I do not want to get bogged down trying to either describe every option or find the perfect word that covers everything. I'm going to keep it simple and sloppy. I'm going to use "monogamy" to mean people who choose to be only in exclusive coupled relationships. I'm going to use "non-monogamy" as an umbrella term for all the wide variety of ways that people have non-exclusive relationships. And I'm going to use "dating" as an umbrella term for all the wide variety of ways that people relate to each other sexually and romantically, whether as one-night partners on a first-name-only basis, or as people in a long-term relationship who don't live together, or whatever. I'm going to use "they" as a generic singular pronoun. I'm going to start a lot of sentences with "for me," because my experience is just one example, not a rule book.
If you are a monogamous person thinking about non-monogamy--either as an option for yourself, or as a theoretical exercise--you might find yourself concerned that a new relationship could destabilize an older one. An older relationship can feel secure, and imagining one or both partners dating someone else can feel like it will threaten that security.
The first thing we have in common: Non-monogamous people worry about this, too! There is such a thing as New Relationship Energy, that mix of excitement and limerence and sexiness and unlimited potential that you can get swept up in with a new person In fact, the book on open relationships I read recently, Opening Up, devotes a section to talking about it.
One way to deal with NRE is to know it can happen, and be smart enough not to make any big decisions during this time. Wait until you've found out your new sweetie's flaws and annoying habits--wait until you've found out that they have flaws and annoying habits, just like your old sweetie--before you consider changing living arrangments or adding them to the checking account or breaking up with that dear old sweetie who's stood by you for so long.
Another way to deal with it is to not have New Relationship Energy when your current relationship is vulnerable. This has been my strategy, and is one of the reasons that my own non-monogamous nature has been so little acted on during my relationship with Raider. Preserving my good relationship with him has always been my highest priority, and as a result I have been extremely conservative for a person who is basically promiscuous.
Sometimes our relationship is being hard work because we have something to figure out. Sometimes, life is just stressful in general--nobody's getting any sleep because a Child Who Will Remain Nameless didn't sleep through the night until he was almost three; or we're so busy with the kids and our jobs that we're struggling to find the time and energy for a private conversation (let alone sex); or my chronic headache is acting up. During these times, I don't date.
From the time I got pregnant with the Lego Savant, in September 2000, until about two years ago, I didn't think about dating at all. It wasn't just on the back burner. The back burner wasn't even lit. We were busy: having babies, caring for babies, learning to nurture our own relationship as a couple while having all those children. (If I were doing a "myths about nonmonogamy" post instead of a "what we have in common" one, I'd say that my experience counters a kind of prevalant assumption that nonmonogamous people are always having multiple relationships, or are indiscriminate in their relationships. But we'll set that to one side for now.)
But we have something even more important than that in common, which is that even monogamous relationships can be destabilized by the Energy of the New. Certainly, one form that takes is infidelity. But any time one person changes, it can also change the relationship. Two of the women I dated when I was in grad school in the late 80s had left homes they shared with long-term partners to attend grad school hundreds or thousands of miles away. Both of those relationships ended during the first year apart. (My lover went with me to grad school, and our relationship as lovers ended during that year, too.)
You can agree not to have other sexual or romantic partners, but you can't ever be sure that your postal-worker girlfriend won't decide to go to med school, or your office-worker boyfriend won't decide he wants to study gender theory at the graduate level, or your artist wife won't realize that if she doesn't move to Europe soon she never will. When I decided I wanted a baby, that could well have been a deal-breaker for me and Raider, had he not somehow found a way to access the very very buried, hitherto completely unknown part of him that wanted to be a dad. We have friends right now whose loving, long-term relationship is threatened because of one's dream to live in particular place--and the other one's strong desire to live somewhere else.
Needing something the other can't give you; finding that there is something you want more than your relationship; someone changing, for good or ill, in ways that make you incompatible: these can happen in any relationship. It takes courage to be open to the new things coming into your life, whether that's a new love or a new religion or a new hobby that takes you away from home every Saturday, because the changes that come with these things are unpredictable. It takes courage, too, to turn away from the new for a time because the relationship matters more.
We all have to find this ever-shifting balance. This is one of the things we have in common. It's not the only one. I may tell you about some of the others sometimes.
A quick note about terminology: I do not want to get bogged down trying to either describe every option or find the perfect word that covers everything. I'm going to keep it simple and sloppy. I'm going to use "monogamy" to mean people who choose to be only in exclusive coupled relationships. I'm going to use "non-monogamy" as an umbrella term for all the wide variety of ways that people have non-exclusive relationships. And I'm going to use "dating" as an umbrella term for all the wide variety of ways that people relate to each other sexually and romantically, whether as one-night partners on a first-name-only basis, or as people in a long-term relationship who don't live together, or whatever. I'm going to use "they" as a generic singular pronoun. I'm going to start a lot of sentences with "for me," because my experience is just one example, not a rule book.
If you are a monogamous person thinking about non-monogamy--either as an option for yourself, or as a theoretical exercise--you might find yourself concerned that a new relationship could destabilize an older one. An older relationship can feel secure, and imagining one or both partners dating someone else can feel like it will threaten that security.
The first thing we have in common: Non-monogamous people worry about this, too! There is such a thing as New Relationship Energy, that mix of excitement and limerence and sexiness and unlimited potential that you can get swept up in with a new person In fact, the book on open relationships I read recently, Opening Up, devotes a section to talking about it.
One way to deal with NRE is to know it can happen, and be smart enough not to make any big decisions during this time. Wait until you've found out your new sweetie's flaws and annoying habits--wait until you've found out that they have flaws and annoying habits, just like your old sweetie--before you consider changing living arrangments or adding them to the checking account or breaking up with that dear old sweetie who's stood by you for so long.
Another way to deal with it is to not have New Relationship Energy when your current relationship is vulnerable. This has been my strategy, and is one of the reasons that my own non-monogamous nature has been so little acted on during my relationship with Raider. Preserving my good relationship with him has always been my highest priority, and as a result I have been extremely conservative for a person who is basically promiscuous.
Sometimes our relationship is being hard work because we have something to figure out. Sometimes, life is just stressful in general--nobody's getting any sleep because a Child Who Will Remain Nameless didn't sleep through the night until he was almost three; or we're so busy with the kids and our jobs that we're struggling to find the time and energy for a private conversation (let alone sex); or my chronic headache is acting up. During these times, I don't date.
From the time I got pregnant with the Lego Savant, in September 2000, until about two years ago, I didn't think about dating at all. It wasn't just on the back burner. The back burner wasn't even lit. We were busy: having babies, caring for babies, learning to nurture our own relationship as a couple while having all those children. (If I were doing a "myths about nonmonogamy" post instead of a "what we have in common" one, I'd say that my experience counters a kind of prevalant assumption that nonmonogamous people are always having multiple relationships, or are indiscriminate in their relationships. But we'll set that to one side for now.)
But we have something even more important than that in common, which is that even monogamous relationships can be destabilized by the Energy of the New. Certainly, one form that takes is infidelity. But any time one person changes, it can also change the relationship. Two of the women I dated when I was in grad school in the late 80s had left homes they shared with long-term partners to attend grad school hundreds or thousands of miles away. Both of those relationships ended during the first year apart. (My lover went with me to grad school, and our relationship as lovers ended during that year, too.)
You can agree not to have other sexual or romantic partners, but you can't ever be sure that your postal-worker girlfriend won't decide to go to med school, or your office-worker boyfriend won't decide he wants to study gender theory at the graduate level, or your artist wife won't realize that if she doesn't move to Europe soon she never will. When I decided I wanted a baby, that could well have been a deal-breaker for me and Raider, had he not somehow found a way to access the very very buried, hitherto completely unknown part of him that wanted to be a dad. We have friends right now whose loving, long-term relationship is threatened because of one's dream to live in particular place--and the other one's strong desire to live somewhere else.
Needing something the other can't give you; finding that there is something you want more than your relationship; someone changing, for good or ill, in ways that make you incompatible: these can happen in any relationship. It takes courage to be open to the new things coming into your life, whether that's a new love or a new religion or a new hobby that takes you away from home every Saturday, because the changes that come with these things are unpredictable. It takes courage, too, to turn away from the new for a time because the relationship matters more.
We all have to find this ever-shifting balance. This is one of the things we have in common. It's not the only one. I may tell you about some of the others sometimes.
Thursday, December 6, 2012
I Have Read a Book About Open Relationships
I am reading a book called Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships. Not that I felt I needed any advice; my relationship with Raider was created almost 20 years ago and is sustaining itself pretty well (Year 20: The best so far, in every way). But I was curious to see what the book said, and curious to see what's up in the world. For many years, busy with child-rearing and whatnot, I not only cleaved only unto Raider, but I paid no attention to what was going on in the, I dunno what you'd call it, non-monogamy community. I was familiar with the word "polyamory," and aware that some folks seemed to prefer it to "non-monogamy," but I didn't know why, or what that word necessarily meant to the people who were using it. If I used it to describe myself, what would I be saying about myself? If I said I was non-monogamous, what connotations would that carry these days? It's not that I'm especially concerned about labels, only that I recently found myself curious about the thinking that folks were doing about these things.
Hence, the book.
It's a great big book, and it has some strengths. I'm not sure, though, that it's one I would recommend to someone just starting to think about whether they might not be purely monogamous, or considering a relationship with someone who is polyamorous or non-monogamous. There are several reasons for that.
For one, the book has a real bias toward non-monogamy. Monogamous people, you will learn from this book, buy into a number of myths, such as the idea that you should get all your needs met by one single person. Not only the author, but a number of her interviewees, mention this. But I have never met a person who believed this. If they did, we'd see a lot more people who formed up into couples and then moved into little hermitages together; weddings would be going-away parties, people weeping into their handkerchiefs because they were never going to see the happy couple again. This is a straw man that people who are non-monogamous like to knock down--and have for as long as I can remember, which is getting to be a long time now--because it makes them feel smarter and more enlightened than exclusive couples.
You will also learn from this book that non-monogamous people are more courageous than monogamous people. There's some truth in this, in that being non-monogamous, especially openly, does take the same kind of moral courage that any kind of unconventional choice does. But monogamy takes courage, too. I think that successful relationships of all kinds require the same kinds of qualities: bravery, honesty, respect for boundaries, acceptance of the beloved.
This book isn't written for monogamous people, and so it's a bit unfair to criticize it by saying that it would be off-putting for a monogamous reader for these reasons. But it bothered me because it's sloppy thinking, and because I believe it is possible to affirm one's own choices without denigrating the authentic choices of others.
Speaking of words: the author likes to say that terminology doesn't really matter, but the book is devoted to parsing words into their narrowest possible divisions. "Non-monogamy," by her definition, means that you have a primary relationship, and other relationships just for sex. "Polyamory" means that you seek out other relationships to meet emotional needs as well. From there, you get "hierarchical" and "non-hierarchical" polyamory, "polyfidelity," "solo polyamory," and so on. You get every possible combination of partners and lovers discussed as its own special case. Labels, labels, labels. I found it tiresome. I began to feel like the hardest part of being poly-non-mono-whatever was going to be figuring out which box I might fit in. But I don't want to be in a box. So, no thank you.
Two other small things: I appreciate the diversity of the people who were interviewed for the book, though, oddly, they are often presented as couples even if there are other people involved. For instance: "Diane and Mike live with their triad partner, Derek." I do think that a lot of people experience their relationships this way--Raider and I, for instance, are probably always going to be a couple, no matter what else happens. I think. But often it seemed like a strange default option on the part of the author as she wrote about people's stories. And I would have liked to hear a bit more from people in long-term relationships. People who've been together for 2 years, or 4, certainly have much to say that is worth listening to. But where are my peers? I'd have liked to hear more from people whose relationships were a little longer in the tooth.
All in all, I'd say The Ethical Slut is a better book. It's more concise, and doesn't spend so much time parsing words to within an inch of their lives. Neither book had much to say that was new to me; of course, I learned what I know in my twenties, and I learned it all the hard way. Maybe reading a book would have been a better idea.
Both of these books make me want to write my own little pamphlet. I would call it, "Loving Your Slutty Friend: A Field Guide to Kink, Casual Sex, and Multiple Relationships For the Vanilla and Monogamous." I would start by talking about what I think we, and our relationships, have in common. It's all just variations on a theme, I would say. It's nothing to be afraid of.
Hence, the book.
It's a great big book, and it has some strengths. I'm not sure, though, that it's one I would recommend to someone just starting to think about whether they might not be purely monogamous, or considering a relationship with someone who is polyamorous or non-monogamous. There are several reasons for that.
For one, the book has a real bias toward non-monogamy. Monogamous people, you will learn from this book, buy into a number of myths, such as the idea that you should get all your needs met by one single person. Not only the author, but a number of her interviewees, mention this. But I have never met a person who believed this. If they did, we'd see a lot more people who formed up into couples and then moved into little hermitages together; weddings would be going-away parties, people weeping into their handkerchiefs because they were never going to see the happy couple again. This is a straw man that people who are non-monogamous like to knock down--and have for as long as I can remember, which is getting to be a long time now--because it makes them feel smarter and more enlightened than exclusive couples.
You will also learn from this book that non-monogamous people are more courageous than monogamous people. There's some truth in this, in that being non-monogamous, especially openly, does take the same kind of moral courage that any kind of unconventional choice does. But monogamy takes courage, too. I think that successful relationships of all kinds require the same kinds of qualities: bravery, honesty, respect for boundaries, acceptance of the beloved.
This book isn't written for monogamous people, and so it's a bit unfair to criticize it by saying that it would be off-putting for a monogamous reader for these reasons. But it bothered me because it's sloppy thinking, and because I believe it is possible to affirm one's own choices without denigrating the authentic choices of others.
Speaking of words: the author likes to say that terminology doesn't really matter, but the book is devoted to parsing words into their narrowest possible divisions. "Non-monogamy," by her definition, means that you have a primary relationship, and other relationships just for sex. "Polyamory" means that you seek out other relationships to meet emotional needs as well. From there, you get "hierarchical" and "non-hierarchical" polyamory, "polyfidelity," "solo polyamory," and so on. You get every possible combination of partners and lovers discussed as its own special case. Labels, labels, labels. I found it tiresome. I began to feel like the hardest part of being poly-non-mono-whatever was going to be figuring out which box I might fit in. But I don't want to be in a box. So, no thank you.
Two other small things: I appreciate the diversity of the people who were interviewed for the book, though, oddly, they are often presented as couples even if there are other people involved. For instance: "Diane and Mike live with their triad partner, Derek." I do think that a lot of people experience their relationships this way--Raider and I, for instance, are probably always going to be a couple, no matter what else happens. I think. But often it seemed like a strange default option on the part of the author as she wrote about people's stories. And I would have liked to hear a bit more from people in long-term relationships. People who've been together for 2 years, or 4, certainly have much to say that is worth listening to. But where are my peers? I'd have liked to hear more from people whose relationships were a little longer in the tooth.
All in all, I'd say The Ethical Slut is a better book. It's more concise, and doesn't spend so much time parsing words to within an inch of their lives. Neither book had much to say that was new to me; of course, I learned what I know in my twenties, and I learned it all the hard way. Maybe reading a book would have been a better idea.
Both of these books make me want to write my own little pamphlet. I would call it, "Loving Your Slutty Friend: A Field Guide to Kink, Casual Sex, and Multiple Relationships For the Vanilla and Monogamous." I would start by talking about what I think we, and our relationships, have in common. It's all just variations on a theme, I would say. It's nothing to be afraid of.