Tympanometry On an Autumn Day in April

Today, I have to study for, and take, an exam on Tympanometry. I do not want to study.

I want to sleep. And before sleeping, and after sleeping, and in between sleeping, I want to lie there and think pleasantly about inconsequential things.

Tympanometry is the study of the compliance of the eardrum. The author of my textbook is a charmingly pedantic person who cannot resist pointing out that when we refer to a drum, we don't just refer to the stretched skin over the head of the drum but also to the space behind it, enclosed within wood, the resonating chamber. Therefore, the author of my textbook says, we should more properly call the eardrum the "eardrum membrane."

No one will ever do this.

There are several important things you can measure about the eardrum membrane. It is a gate which allows some to pass and denies others; when it passes acoustic energy into the middle ear, this is called admittance. When it opposes the movement of acoustic energy, this is called impedance. Once upon a time, someone coined the portmanteau word "immitance" to describe these two things together: what is admitted, what is denied.

I do not want to study the four types of basic immitance tests and their eight purposes. I want to sit in my chair and look out the dirty window into my badly-tended yard, which is miserable today with wind and rain and gray clouds so low they could almost roof your house. I would sit there with a book of poetry in my lap, and read a poem every now and then, and then look out the window for awhile, not thinking about the poem, and then turn a couple of pages and read another one.

Tympanometry measure the compliance of the eardrum: how willing is it to move when you push or pull on it by manipulating the pressure in the ear canal. If I were an eardrum, I would not be compliant at all. "What type of tympanogram are you?" would make a terrible internet quiz, but my answer would be: Type AS. I am shallow and stiff. I have low compliance. It is possible I represent ossicular fixation. That would hardly surprise me.

The ossicles are the bones of your middle ear. You were taught to call them the hammer, the anvil, the stirrup. They are the smallest bones in the human body, in particular the stirrup, which I have learned to call the stapes as I have become inculturated to the language of my field. So many common, everyday words replaced with jargon. Earwax, eardrum, hammer and anvil, ear; ceruman, tympanum, malleus and incus, helix, concha cavum, triangular fossa.

There is a poetry to it, all that latin. I'm not sorry to be learning it, except today, when I don't want to be learning. Perhaps I am a Type B tympanogram. I am an eardrum with no compliance at all. I may be perforated, or diseased.

I can tell you the normal volume of the ear canal in both adults and children when measured at 200 decaPascals of air pressure. You might not think this matters, but it does. It is diagnostically significant. But I don't care much about that today. I can tell you, too, that the goldfinch I can see through my dirty window, enlivening my depressed front yard with his ready-to-mate springtime brilliance, weighs about half an ounce. We may be proud of the tininess of our stapes, our stirrup, 3 millimeters from end to end, and the precise way its footpad rests in the oval window of the cochlea, ready to pass on--not only pass on, but to amplify--whatever acoustic energy has made it past the bouncer at the door of Club Eardrum Membrane. But I bet that goldfinch's bones would put our ossicular chain to shame.

Were you surprised to hear me say the cochlea has a window? It has two, actually, the oval window and a round one as well. It is like a hobbit house in there. There are round windows in my bird feeder, too, not the thistle feeder the goldfinches love so much but the other one, that usually has sunflower seeds and millet and the occasional peanut. A cardinal is there now, poking his beak into each of the round feeder ports, circumnavigating the feeder on its circular perch. He always hopes to find something better in the next round window, but he does not. They all have the same thing in them. They are all empty. Both the dirty window and my eadrum membrane admit the sound of the brief, irritated chirps he makes each time his beak comes up empty. He goes around twice, just to be sure, and then flies away.

When I leave to take my exam, I will first fill the feeder from the bag of seed mix I keep in the garage, and the cardinal will come back, all forgiven. The birds' love for me, for my yard, lasts only as long as the seed does, and then it quickly turns to anger or indifference. But it turns back into love the moment the feeder is full again. If they were eardrums, they'd be highly compliant. They are easily moved.

Yesterday one of my children killed a mouse by hitting it with a stick. One of the cats had caught the mouse, and I believe my son thought he was being merciful. Perhaps he was being merciful. It's so hard to say. One mouse, taken up by a cat, escapes to live whatever span of life a mouse is given. Another, broken somehow inside, can only die. It is impossible for us to know which mouse our son killed, the blessed mouse, the mouse upon whom Providence smiled that day, or the doomed mouse, the one whose small limp body I would have taken up later and, with regret, laid down again in an out-of-the-way place to fulfill its next destiny. A cat cannot be blamed for acting in accord with its nature; a mouse, whose kind have always produced enough progeny to feed the owls and the cats and the smaller hawks and still leave the world with more mice than it started with--well, what I mean to say is that a mouse cannot bear the weight of too much grieving.

Now a dark-eyed junco is pecking at the ground under the feeder, scavenging for fallen millet. I love these birds with their deep gray above and clear white underneath, and I never see one without wishing to hold it, to feel its small body rest between my palms. I would never hurt it. I would take as much pleasure in letting it go as I had in scooping it into my hands in the first place.

But I will never hold a dark-eyed junco unless it's injured, unless we find it unmoving but still breathing under the window or carried into the breezeway by a cat. I know how to make an injured bird a nest in a small box, and where to put the box to keep it warm. I know what it is like to come check the box to find the bird standing up, peering at me with sharp intelligent eyes, ready to fly again, and I know what it is like to find it still and cold. I know that there is little you can do for the injured bird besides keep it safe from opportunistic cats, and, perhaps, children a bit too eager to dispense mercy.

The first step in any examination of the ear is otoscopy, peeking into the ear canal to check for ear wax, bugs, beans, plant life, infection. A healthy tympanic membrane glows a pearlescent pink, and it refracts the beam from your otoscope into a cone of light that is not an intrinsic part of the eardrum but is nonetheless a beacon declaring that all is well. I have never seen the cone of light for myself; only pictures. But I know that one day I will.

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Epistle from the Poly and/or Kinky Friends Retreat

I spent late weekend on retreat with some other Quakers. This is the epistle we wrote:

Dear Friends,

During the weekend of March 21, 2014, a small group of Friends who identify as polyamorous and/or kinky met together in retreat for fellowship and discernment, with a focus on the intersection of spirituality and sexuality. We enjoyed good food and warm fires as we shared stories and got to know each other better.

We are part of a larger group of Friends who have been meeting during FGC Gatherings and FLGBTQC Midwinter Gatherings over the last few years, and this was our first opportunity for such an extended time together. We continue to wrestle worshipfully with questions of how we might be more integrated into the wider community of the Religious Society of Friends. We long to have our relationships recognized and respected, but we also hope to share our gifts, talents, and ministry. We are abundantly blessed with gifts for open-hearted loving, and experienced with the radical honesty that our relationships call us to. We hold ourselves to high standards of integrity, truth, and faithfulness, and it pains us that we are limited in the expression of our gifts by common misunderstandings of who we are and what we do.

We wonder why the Divine has brought us together, and what our faithful work might be. We are on a path that is not clear to us, but despite our fears and uncertainties, we strive to be faithful, and to use the relative privilege and safety we enjoy to begin work that we hope will increase understanding, grace, and love. Sending this epistle in the tradition of Friends is our next step. We welcome your prayers as our work continues and our path slowly unfolds before us.

In love and faithfulness,

SH, Daniel C. Hall, David, Vonn New, Adlai, Su Penn, Ann, SW, CL, and Judy

Won't Someone Think of the Children?

In October, CNN published this pretty good article about a family made up of three adults and their nine-year old daughter. Of course, the responses across the internet ranged from supportive to appalled, and many on toward the "appalled" side of the spectrum purported to be about the writers' concerns over a child being raised in such a family. Some folks assumed that the situation was de facto unhealthy; others saw it as unstable, and wondered what it would do to the girl when her family broke up and the third partner, who is not one of her biological or legal parents, disappeared from her life.

Whenever an unconventional relationship comes up, onlookers always express concern about the children. Whether it's the mixed-race child of a biracial couple, or the black child adopted into a predominantly white family, single women or men becoming parents by choice, lesbians and gay men parenting, or non-monogamous people practicing non-monogamy while raising kids, the same questions come up: Is this good for the child? Won't it be harmful to them? What about the social stigma they'll face? Is this family--whether of gay men or of three people in a partnership or a couple that dates outside the relationship--too inherently unstable to raise children?

This concern is so common that I have even had a polyamorous friend tell me he thought it was wrong for parents to practice polyarmory while raising their children.

I, of course, have several thoughts about this.

Gosh, I Never Thought of That Before

I can't tell you how many people have told me that the Tiny Tornado might change his mind about his gender expression. People somehow believe that the first thought that pops into their heads when they hear about him is something that hasn't occurred to us in all the years we've been living in the situation.

The "what about the kids" questions about polyamory feels similar. Whether people pay due attention to the needs of their kids is independent of whether they're monogamous. Surely you can think of plenty of examples of monogamously married people who think only of their own wants and needs and not of their children's; I was raised by such people, and I'm pretty sure my brother is another such parent. Whether people take good care of their kids' physical and emotional needs is about whether they take good care of their kids' physical and emotional needs, not about whether they do that as a single parent, part of a married couple, as part of a trio, as someone who's been celibate for decades or someone who has a new sexual partner every time the moon is full.

This is why I'm such a fan of the good-faith question. Because I'm perfectly happy to answer those. "How have you dealt with being a parent and being polyamorous," for instance, is a good-faith question, and I can tell you a story to help answer it. "Don't you worry about your kids?" is not a good faith question, because it tells me that you think the answer is "No, I don't. I think only of my own gratification." But that's not how it is.

Last year, I dated a person I'll call Lovely Girlfriend. It was a long-distance relationship that started at a Quaker gathering, and the first time I visited her, we were sitting in her kitchen drinking tea and she said to me, "So, I'd like to talk about breaking up."

"So soon?" I said. "I didn't think we were there yet."

She wasn't dumping me. But she wanted to talk to me about how to be with each other so that if we stopped dating (and we did, about a year later), we could do it well. We both have kids; we like each other's kids, and our kids are friends. At Gatherings, we've done a lot of shared kid-activities and reciprocal child care. We have a lot of friends in common, and a relatively small, tight-knit community of people is an important part of both our lives. Lovely Girlfriend wanted to talk about how we would be with each other so that, whether dating turned out to be a long-term thing or not, we could still care for each other's kids, and we could continue to share our community.

It boiled down to being decent, and honest. And I think we were. Next time we see Lovely Girlfriend and her kids, the children might or might not sense that the relationship between us is different than it was. But her younger kid will still hug me hello (I hope), I'll still be happy to take the whole passel somewhere fun while Lovely Girlfriend fulfills a work commitment, she'll still sit with my younger kids in the cafeteria while I have a committee meeting, and the two of us will still be glad of the moments we can steal to be together in the busyness of a gathering. She'll still be one of my kids' grown-up friends, and mine, too.

Things aren't always that smooth, because people aren't always decent and honest, especially if strong emotions get involved. But that leads me directly to my next point:

My Kids Have Lost Precious Grownups. But It Hasn't Been Anybody I Was Dating

I think people who worry about relationship instability in polyamorous relationships imagine that we're doing something like telling the kids, "Hey, kids, here's Lovely Girlfriend. She's your new Other Mommy. Give Other Mommy a great big kiss!" And then a year later, Other Mommy is gone and the children are bereft.

We haven't done it that way, though. Lovely Girlfriend and I, for instance, were friends before we started dating, and we didn't announce the change to the kids, though they did notice we were visiting each other a lot more. Once when I hung up the phone, Word Boy said, "Was that Lovely Girlfriend?" and I said, "No, it was my doctor. Why?" He said, "Because usually you only answer if it's Lovely Girlfriend." So, you know, they do notice things. But they don't get real-time updates every time a relationship shifts a bit in one direction or another.

I always want to tell people, too, that being monogamous doesn't necessarily protect your kids from these kinds of losses. It hasn't protected mine. Raider used to have a friend, one of his best friends since college, who was very involved with us and our kids for years. She was so close that the kids called her "Aunt Cowrie," and my photo albums are full of pictures of her giving Baby Lego Savant bottles, playing with him, reading books to him, helping him plant flowers. She was the one who saw Word Boy's first steps, hanging out in our living room with him while I cooked dinner, and the turtle-shaped sandbox we recently got rid of was a gift from her.

And then she disappeared. She told Raider that she disapproved of our parenting so strongly that she couldn't bear to stay around and watch us ruin the children. And, just like that, one of the most important people in my kids' lives was gone.

But we still had Farina, one of my best friends, and her family. Now that was a close, stable relationship--a few years ago, Raider commented that our families had become to intertwined he didn't think we could get rid of each other if we tried. We lived about an hour apart, but visited back and forth regularly. For most of a school year, I kept their oldest son two days a week while they were experimenting with homeschooling, but that was OK because he was one of the Lego Savant's best friends. Farina repaired my front door and put new screens in the breezeway windows. I lent her money to buy her first rowing shell, and she lent me money when we were having trouble paying our mortgage during the custody fight with TT's birthfather. We took vacations together. Farina's wife became a good friend in her own right.

And then some problems Farina had with PTSD and depression got worse, and she began to lie to me, and to be verbally abusive. When I tried to talk to her about the situation, she became more entrenched, describing herself as my victim and redoubling her attacks on my character. I ended the relationship, and one more time the kids--and I--lost someone important.

You all probably know, as well, that last Christmas my dad, the kids' only surviving grandparent, disowned me for letting the Tiny Tornado live as a boy. I don't expect to see him again.

My point is, my kids have already suffered the kinds of losses that people worry about when polyamory comes up. But not because I was dating someone. We could have avoided these losses by not having best friends and a dad, but that hardly seems reasonable. (And I don't go around asking people with friends and parents whether they've really thought about the risks.)

Let Me Sum Up

My point, and it seems like such an obvious one that I can't believe I've taken so many words to make it, is that, in some ways, there is nothing special about the relationships you have when you're polyamorous, and the path they take is as varied as the paths taken by monogamous marriages, close friendships, relationships with biological family, dating relationships you have when you're single. As parents, we're making decisions all the time about who is part of our children's lives: whether to take them back to Miserable Small Town for another crappy tension-filled Penn family Thanksgiving, for instance (thank you, Dad, for solving that one for me); whether to introduce them to a certain friend; whether to trust them with that coach or that teacher. We make decisions ourselves about who to trust with our own hearts. Sometimes we get it right; sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes we get it right and it still goes wrong. Sometimes somebody you thought would be there forever, isn't, and there's nothing you can do about it.

I still trust people. I trust Raider to the ends of the earth. I think we'll be together forever, but I believe that even if we're not, he will always be a great dad and a decent person. I have a girlfriend now that my kids adore, and I trust her with them. I trust her with their hearts. She might break mine, but she'll always take care of theirs.

But what I trust most is myself. I trust me to take good care of my children. I trust me to stand by them. I trust me to get into good relationships, and to get out of bad ones without drama. I trust me to explain things to my kids, as clearly and compassionately as I can, and I trust me to stand by them as they work out any confusion or sadness they feel. I trust me to do these things because I have done these things. I trust them to be smart, loving, emotionally whole, and resiliant, because they have always been these things.

There will always be losses. That is the cost of loving. I hope my kids come to feel, as I do, that the loving is worth it.

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The Five That Didn't Go Viral, and the One That Did

Last August, the Quaker magazine Friends Journal published an article I wrote about the Tiny Tornado. it went viral, getting over 20,000 "likes" on Facebook, and about 145,000 pageviews. This was, of course, very exciting.

Glad I Got a Screenshot Before the Counter Reset Itself

And yet, it causes one to reflect on the vicissitudes of the internet, and what does and doesn't go viral. Because that is not the best thing I've ever written, not even on the subject of the Tiny Tornado. It's not the funniest, or the most insightful, or the best-written, or the most thought-provoking. I have written several things in the past that I thought might catch the eye of a larger audience, that didn't. I will share them with you now.

The Five That Didn't Go Viral, But Might Have

Back when I had only one baby, I wrote this hilarious bit for some friends, imagining that diaper-changing was an Olympic sport. Share the link with your friends and they might spit coffee onto their keyboards, which is always fun.

Well, the quality of the sport just isn't what it used to be. In my day, every serious competitor at the national level had at least four children in at most six years; now it's all mothers-of-one. In 1978, I had to perform a near-perfect Simultaneous Bowel Movements of 8-Month-Old and Two-Year-Old in Car With Light-Colored Upholstery While Running Late to Pick Up Four-Year-Old From Preschool to win my second gold, but the multiple-child events have been completely phased out in recent years.

On the subject of gender transition, I wrote this piece on what we call "the mail forwarding stage," that time when you're on-board with the new name and pronouns but your brain hasn't quite caught up. I've never seen anybody else write a piece on this phenomenon. A dozen more people should read it, at least.

The most hilarious part of the mail-forwarding stage is that your brain starts checking to see if other names and pronouns need to be forwarded as well. You call non-trans friends by the wrong pronoun from time to time as the system over-corrects. When one close friend was transitioning a decade or so ago, I was once stopped dead because I suddenly couldn't remember whether one of my closest friends--a non-trans woman, as I know perfectly well--should be referred to as "he" or "she." Tiny little postal workers in my brain were dashing around chaotically, running back and forth between stations, flipping through piles of memos, trying to find the paperwork. I was frozen and stammering for a moment until they got it sorted out.

Last year some time, I wrote this really terrific essay about how my body image changed after I came out as a lesbian. With photographic proof!

The young woman on the glider drinking a Dr. Pepper is an amazing physical specimen. She can ride her bike 60 miles in a day, set up camp, and then hop back on to go exploring, riding another 10 or 20 miles before bed. Her bulging thighs and calves are like granite. But she believes herself to be basically an unfit and sedentary person, because she is so often harassed for the time she spends sitting around reading, and because she does not play any sports or do anything "athletic." She does her best to hide when the camera comes out, because even though she is in the middle of pedaling her bike over 700 miles across the state of Michigan and then up the western shore to the UP, she is ashamed of her body.

This piece is about sex and how much I like it. It's wonderfully written and edgy in just the right way to get internet attention. Yet there it sits non-virally.

I had some bad sex, sure. I also had some very good sex. And I had some terrific sex with people it wasn't worth being in a relationship with.

And this is an absolutely splendid bit of Pride & Prejudice fan fiction. OK, I don't really think there are tens of thousands of people out there dying to read this. But the 300 to whom it is of interest? Should be all over it, gushing at me and offereing to sew me a new pelisse.

"Lord, Lizzie," said Lydia Wickham to her one day as the sisters walked out together, "I would not be married to your husband for ten Pemberleys. He is always out of sorts."

 

 

 

 

To All The Girls I've Loved Before

I came across this poem by Jack Gilbert this morning, and it seemed to speak to something like what I talked about in yesterday's post.

Cherishing What Isn't

Ah, you three women whom I have loved in this

long live, along with the few others.

And the four I may have loved, or stopped short

of loving. I wander through these woods

making songs of you. Some of regret, some

of longing, and a terrible one of death.

I carry the privacy of your bodies

and hearts in me. The shameful ardor

and the shameless intimacy, the secret kinds

of happiness and the walled-up childhoods.

I carol loudly of you among trees emptied

of winter and rejoice quietly in summer.

A score of women if you count love both large

and small, real ones that were brief

and those that lasted. Gentle love and some

almost like an animal with its prey.

What is left is what's alive in me. The failing

of your beauty and its remaining.

You are like countries in which my love

took place. Like a bell in the trees

that makes your music in each wind that moves.

A music composed of what you have forgotten.

That will end with my ending.

I love this poem, not least for its echoes of Whitman ("I sing the songs of the glory of you," said Whitman), right up until the line "You are like countries in which my love took place," at which point Gilbert just blithely removes the personhood of 20 or so women. He's a lover; they're locations in which his love plays out. So, love is something a man does in a woman, the way he might be a tourist or a scholar or an archeologist in foreign country. What metaphors didn't make it into the final draft, I wonder? Were they blank pages on which he wrote his life? Prepared canvasses eager to receive his warm, moist paint? Bleah.

 

I'm not too fond of "What is left is what's alive in me," either, because unless I'm mistaken, when a relationship ends in something other than death, two people walk away from it, each of them carrying their piece of it. In Gilbert's vision, the women he's loved have forgotten; only he remembers, so the music that is these women's music ("a bell in the trees that makes your music") is something only he hears and only he carries and it will last only as long as he lives.

 

Bit of an egoist there, Jacky-boy. As if there aren't some 19-ish women out there, for some of whom you were a love, and for some of whom you were someone they "may have loved, or stopped short of loving," some of whom think of you with longing, or with regret, others of whom certainly think of you with indifference, or not at all. Perhaps there is at least one who sings to herself a song of your terrible death. When you died last November, surely some of these women saw the obituary and said, "Jack Gilbert...he was my lover once. I remember him." Surely not everything you claim as yours belonged only to you. I expect you know that by now.

 

 

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A Crusade. But Without the Oppression and Death

I hate when I have something to write and keep starting dead-end drafts. So screw that. I'm on the internet now. I can do a listicle.

Things I like about polyamory:

1. My girlfriends' girlfriends, boyfriends, and significant others.

Sometimes when you're dating someone, they come with a sweetheart as a kind of bonus. If the person you're dating is awesome, odds are that their sweetheart will be at least that awesome if not moreso. And you can get a kind of privileged access to the sweetheart by virtue of dating their girlfriend. I know that everyone you get involved with, whether monogamously or not, might come with friends, family members, children, and pets that get to be part of your life, too, but there's a special kind of intimacy that comes from being lovers with the same person. There's even a jargon-y name for it, metamours. I like being metamours with cool people. I like having someone else who knows exacly what I mean when I say that my girlfriend is amazing in a certain way, or annoying in a certain other way. I have had the experience of sitting next to a metamour, seeing our mutual sweetie across the room, saying, "Isn't she lovely?" and sighing contentedly in shared understanding.
I remember the first time, more than 20 years ago, that I sat down to a meal with a girlfriend, her long-term partner, and her partner's other partner. I was nervous but I liked it. I liked the cross-currents of love and affection. I liked the teasing looks my girlfriend's partner was sending my way, and I liked listening to the mattter-of-fact way the three of them worked out their schedule for the coming week.

I like the feeling of a web of affection and desire. It's that simple.

2. I like my girlfriends, past and present, and my partner, and don't want to be without them.
Love and sexual desire are notoriously bad at following rules or bending themselves to practicality. Interracial couples have always loved one another whether it was legal or not. Princesses love stableboys, and so do princes from time to time.

I have loved many people in my life, some briefly and tragically, some briefly and brilliantly, some--well, one so far--forever. I have broken many rules to have these loves. I broke the rule about not being in same-sex relationships, and I broke the popular 1990s lesbian rule about not loving trans men. Eventually I broke my own rule that I was a lesbian, and settled down with Raider. I have broken many times the rules about age differences in sexual relationships.

And every time, I'm glad I didn't let a rule stop me. "But she's a girl!" would have kept me from my first real love. "She's 25 years older than you!" would have kept me from a relationship I learned a great deal from and remember very fondly. "He's a man" would have kept me from Raider.
I'm a big fan of standards, and maybe I'll talk about what that means another time. But rules? Not so much. A rule is Robert Frost's wall, about which he says:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.

Frost says, "I could say elves...but it's not elves exactly." I say it's love, particularly love in the form of sexual desire, that wants the walls down. And I will make the claim that is not been a lack of morality or an unhealthy promiscuity or a recklessness toward my own feelings or my partners' that has led me to squeeze through the narrow gaps in so many walls in search of the light I can see shining through from the other side.

It has been love, which in all its forms is ultimately the same form. And this is one of the ways I have been called to be in service to love in my life.

What I don't like about polyamory:

This is the world's shortest list. There is only one item on it. I don't like having to mold my behavior to standards that make no sense to me. I've never been good at it. I have no notion of "too much information." I am comfortable disclosing almost anything, and comfortable hearing almost anything. I have never been good at being in the closet, and once I came out never spent much time there. As a lesbian in my 20s, I accepted both the restrictions and the freedoms that being out brought with it.
But I can't be fully out right now. I can't talk in specifics. I can tell you I'm poly, but I can't tell you about anyone I might be seeing who isn't Raider, at least not on my blog or on Facebook. And there are good reasons for this. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.

I hate that I know people who've lost friendships because they came out as poly; I lost friendships when I came out a lesbian, and one of the costs of being in the closet is not knowing who would stand by you if they knew. I hate that someone with a vindictive ex could lose child custody over this, or that parents could withdraw from their adult children, or that employment could be jeopardized, or church or Meeting membership, or a community lost. I dislike being discreet, I'm bad at it even when I try, and I fear harming someone else by a failure to be as discreet as I should be.

Still, many times in my life I have been the one to blurt out something "inappropriate," and it has been my experience over and over again that when somebody like me opens her big mouth and says something wildly inappropriate, there is nearly always someone listening who needed to hear it. I've had a woman tell me that a story I read helped her be brave enough to admit to some of her own sexual desires, with great results. I've had many people say "I thought I was the only one." When word got out in the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival worker camp, back in the 90s, that I had a lover who was a trans man, there was controversy--I had one crewmate who couldn't resist bringing me the negative gossip she'd overheard, of which there was apparently plenty. But I was also sought out by multiple women who identified as lesbians but had a partner who wanted to transition; or were beginning a relationship with a trans man; or had had a relationship with a cis-gendered man that they'd felt they had to keep secret for fear of being judged or ostracized in their lesbian community.
They wanted to talk to me because they knew they could tell me about these things. When I tell you how many people I've slept with or how recently I experienced sexual gratification or what I like to do in bed, I'm not just being Su Who Has Never Been Able to Keep Her Mouth Shut. At least, I'm not only being that. I am fighting a crusade against shame.

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The Anniversary

November 8 was my mom's birthday, and I was really taken by surprise when I had a bit of a meltdown over it. My mom died a year ago today, and my year hasn't been anything like what other people told me it would be. My relationship with my mom was such that her death brought a mix of grief, anger, and relief, and after a couple of weeks of grieving, I didn't feel it much.

There was only one time all year--in a Whole Foods in Philadelphia--when I saw something that reminded me of her and felt sad for a minute. And only once, about two months ago, did I have the impulse to talk to her about something. And then I had to laugh at myself because whenever I gave into that impulse while she was alive, it ended badly for me.

I'm surprised, therefore, and a little pissed off, to be having anniversary-of-death related feelings today. But there you have it. Apparently the emotional brain has an internal clock that keeps track of these things. I've been in a very low mood the last few days, and I suppose this is part of it. I suppose, too, that it will pass.

When my parents were alive--oh, there's a Freudian slip. My dad is still alive, but he disowned me at Christmastime last year and I haven't seen him since. Anyway, when my parents were part of our lives, I didn't talk to my kids about the bad stuff in my relationship with them. I wanted my kids to have their own relationship with my parents, whatever that might be. But since they've been gone, I've had opportunities to talk to the older kids about how complicated things were.

One day recently, Word Boy was with me someplace, and I got chatting with an old guy, as I often do. The old guy was going on and on about the pleasures of grandparenthood, and I said, in a making-conversation-way, "Yes, my parents loved being grandparents. My dad says the best part of being a parent is the grandchildren." This is true.

But Word Boy doesn't miss much, and he asked me about it later: if grandma and grandpa like being grandparents so much, how come we hardly ever saw them? And I had to say that my parents did really love being grandparents--to my brother's kids. Why they weren't interested in mine, I don't know. But they weren't. They used to take care of my brother's older two kids all the time, and when he and his wife had a late-life baby a few years ago, my dad even learned to change diapers so they could babysit him, because my mom's arthritis no longer allowed her to do it.

But when I called once, when I was pregnant with Word Boy, to ask if they might watch the Lego Savant for a few hours so Raider and I could go to lunch and a matinee, my mom let me know that they were not, and would not be, available to babysit my kids. I honestly don't know why. I can't even claim that they always liked my brother better because as far as I could tell growing up, they didn't like either one of us. So I couldn't explain it to Word Boy. I could only tell him about it.

Whenever I write about this, somebody e-mails me or comments on Facebook to say, "Su, isn't it time you got over this?" But I would argue that I am over it. I'm living a functional life, I'm in a functional relationship (technically, two functional relationships), I take good care of my kids, I'm loved by my friends and valued in my community.

My parents did a pretty good job of fucking up my childhood, but I unfucked my life all on own.* I don't think it means I'm "not over it" if I still sometimes think about it, or have feelings. And I don't think it means I'm not over it if I refuse to pretend to conform to some narrative where I show my spiritual depth by declaring my mother forgiven. My mother had so many opportunities in her life to change the way she did things: when I asked, in so many words, for things to change during my teenage years; when I reached out to her in my 20s; when my cousin went into rehab and my aunt took a long, hard look at the ways she'd reproduced their upbringing as she was raising her kids; heck, any time during the last 20 years of living next door to my brother and watching him hurt his kids the same way he and I were hurt.** It was her choice, every time, to cling to what she knew instead of working for something better.

It doesn't matter whether I forgive her or not. She made her choices, right up to the end, and she's gone now. I do miss her, but I miss even more the hope I could never let go of that someday I'd have a mother I could trust to be kind to me. I didn't realize until she died how much I was still hoping for that. There's no point in hoping anymore, but I don't suppose I'll ever stop wishing for it.

Footnotes:

* "All on my own" if by "all on my own" you mean with the help of a middle-school librarian, two lesbian high school math teachers, my grandfather's cousin Marion, my great-aunts Hazel and Doris, my friends Carol and Amy, my first woman lover, three particularly helpful therapists, Raider and Toots, and friends too numerous to name.

** I used to be so angry at my brother for his part in what was painful about my childhood that I didn't want to see him get better. I wanted to be better than him. I spent so much of my childhood being tormented and humiliated by him that I wanted to spend the rest of my life looking down on him. Of course, I wasn't thinking about his children. I'd give just about anything for my niece and nephews to have the world's greatest dad, even if it meant admitting my brother was better than me.

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