awakenings

I was nineteen when D. found me – I always think of it that way, as if he rescued me (poor, straggled waif) from the side of the road – and I had such faith in us, the blind kind of faith possessed only by the very young. I had my doubts, of course, but my feelings for him were centre stage; anything else was simply a shapeless murmur that I could tuck discreetly behind the curtains. I turned down the nagging soundtrack of my doubt in favour of a softer melody, one which he and I could move to.

And we did move. Oh, did we ever move. We had a peculiar sort of rhythm – lilting, hasty, charmingly uneven – but we made it our own. We were reckless and stupid and utterly beautiful. We spun so fast it was dizzying, straight into parenthood and village life, with three cars and a business and a four-bedroom detached. Often, I would put a foot out of place just to slow us down, but his gentle brand of confidence was infectious and he coaxed me back into the circle of his arms with little effort. Young, clumsy, overeager, I wanted so badly to know, to learn. Again and again, I begged him: Show me. Tell me. Teach me to dance.

Ever the patient instructor, he did as I asked. In return, I threw myself into us heart and soul – and I believed. I believed in him, and in me, and in us. I believed in our family, and in our home. Most of all, I believed I would never again experience a love so unshakably fierce. Even as the music began to skip, and our steps began to falter, I thought for sure that we would dance together forever.

I tell you this for one reason: so that you know what I felt for him was real. I could not lie about that even if I had wanted to; I am just not that good an actress. When the shit hits the fan – and I know now that it will; I can feel it coming – I want everyone to know that. I want him to know that.

I didn’t lie. I didn’t know.

Prop 102 would amend the Arizona Constitution to say "only a union between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in this state". This issue is on the ballot for November 4th, even though Arizona residents voted on, and rejected, this issue just two short years ago.

This time around, the “Yes On 102” campaign has a huge budget to spread their message. Their billboards, signs, and radio/television ads are everywhere right now. It’s easy to let that make us feel invisible, marginalized, hopeless….but now, more than ever; we cannot afford to let that happen.

Consider this a call to action! We want to counter those images and messages of divisiveness, exclusion and prejudice with images of inclusion, equality and acceptance.

If you live in Arizona take a picture of you in front of your “No on 102’ lawn sign, print a sign for your car window and take a picture of that, or stand in front of one of the “Yes” signs holding your own handmade sign that shows your support of equality and your desire to defeat this proposition. Kiss, hug, hold hands, flash a big peace sign…whatever you’re inspired to do.*

If you live elsewhere in the country, but want to show your support, make a sign of your own celebrating acceptance, equality, love.  Involve your children, neighbors – heck, get your pets in the mix too – just make sure to write “No On 102” somewhere on the sign!

Margaret Mead said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

To that we add, never underestimate the power of a simple photograph. Our pictures, taken from the heart, often speak louder than our voices ever could. Collectively we believe these images will carry our message of equality forward and outward – spreading a wave of positive energy that will help us defeat this proposition once and for all.

*Just keep it legal folks – nothing obscene or vulgar, and definitely nothing against the law – no graffiti or defacement, keep it positive!

Please blog about us, link to us, send our information to your friends and family.  Consider making a sign or taking a pic and uploading it to our flickr group or email it to noon102@gmail.com.  Add us as your friend on Myspace (and make us your top friend until the election) or join our group on facebook. Check out our ‘Get Involved’ page for more ways to help, and make a donation to help us fight against this proposition.  Every little bit helps.

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I shared this video and the lyrics to this Missy Higgins song once before. Since the beginning of my awakenings this song has spoken directly to my experience on every possible level, and this new video makes my connection to the song even more poignant – especially considering my post from last night.

There’s an ache that never leaves me, the tears spill over now without warning. Driving down the freeway, lying between cool white sheets in bed at night, standing at the sink staring into space while scrubbing dried oatmeal off of abandoned breakfast dishes… the mindlessness of the activity allows the vortex of my memories to begin that perilous spin. I imagine that if tears could carve a path, there would be well worn furrows down my cheeks by now; rivers and streams and tributaries born of loss and regret. I cannot stop thinking of what was and what can never be again, not because I wish to go backwards, but because I must grieve for what had to be lost along the way.

In the past year I have begun the process of stepping fully into myself, of accepting who I am, of embracing myself and my truth. There was a tendency, in the beginning, to think that this negated all that came before. My recent journey has been all about understanding that my past – the woman that I was and the life that I led – was no less me. My life till that point was no less valid or authentic or right – it was just not the complete story. Who I am now does not eclipse who I used to be – this life no more legitimate than that one. The fact that this is so very right does not need to make all that came before wrong. I do not need to view my life with a harsh divide separating my before and my after. Indeed these are just different parts of the very same journey, MY journey.

It is clear to me that this part of my path is as much about looking back as it is about looking forward. I mourn deeply the loss of my past, my husband and best friend, my intact and happy family. I need to give myself permission to do this, and I need to learn to do it in a way that does not detract from moving forward into a future with my love, with our children, toward a level of independence and personal growth that has little to do with sexuality and everything to do with owning my experience and creating a fully authentic life.

Yes, I am sad right now. It is not a sadness that leads to the sort of dramatic breakdowns that have been all too frequent over the past year. It’s not about guilt or fear or denial or breathless sobbing and raging into the night. It is a quiet, deep, seemingly bottomless sadness. It is a sadness that lives in the memories of happier days, of the loss of the part of my heart that will always belong to him, of the disappearance of a planned future and a life mapped out together. It is realizing that the joy of beginning this life does not have the power to wipe out the grief of losing that life, and of knowing that there is nothing that can be done but let this sadness fall down on me, and cloak me in its shadows.

It is the sadness of acceptance, and I somehow think that it might be the hardest to bear.

What do you do with the pictures? What happens to eleven years of snapshots and cheesy portrait studio enlargements, wedding albums and vacation pictures? Horrid Walmart engagement photos that stand as a forever reminder of a very bad hair day, murky underwater snorkeling shots of unidentified fish in Hawaii, precious photos of the first moments of parenthood?

What do you do with the shriveled balloons he bought you on your first valentines day, the souvenirs from your trip to NYC in the spring of 1999, with the birthday cards filled with sappy handwritten notes? How do you split up a decades worth of personalized Christmas tree ornaments, carefully chosen during a holiday shopping trip each year – even the pets’ names carefully added in with permanent marker. Who gets the home videos – hours upon hours beginning with teary eyed ‘I do’s’ and extending through first breaths and birthday parties and wobbly steps and Christmas mornings?

Who keeps the locks of hair lovingly saved from the first hair cut? How can you divide the stick figure drawing of your family of four, proudly rendered at preschool in bright crayola marker? What about wedding rings engraved with words of forever and partially filled in baby books and anniversary gifts and ticket stubs and random shoeboxes full of 11 years worth of collected nostalgia?

When you are faced with separating two lives that have been wholly intertwined for so long you discover that you are surrounded by representations of that relationship, both concrete and symbolic. Your house is filled with a million symbols of the bonds, of the happy times when anything seemed possible, of the family you built and the history you shared and the plans you made.

When all is said and done, and it all comes down to the final weeks of living under the same roof, those mementos are all that remain of both dream and reality. Keepsakes of a life that no longer exists, they are both more priceless and more meaningless than you ever thought possible.

And the final question lingers…what on earth do you do with the memories?

Clearly, I’ve been a little neglectful in posting lately. As I look back at my archives from the past several months there is something even more obvious than an overall shortage of posts – since late December I have only written about one side of my life.

I wrote this, directly from my aching heart onto the computer screen, the night S. and I moved into separate rooms. In the months since I have not written a word about the remnants of the life I once lead. I haven’t been able to bring myself to talk to you about the reality of existing in this familiar yet foreign space. I have found it near impossible to find words for the balancing act required to straddle the distance between the places I came from and the places I am headed, especially knowing that some parts of me will always live in this crazy, mixed-up in-between.

I’ve not mentioned the pain, the loss, the anger and bitterness, the omnipresent weight of the guilt that will be my forever baggage. I’ve ignored the heart break, the loneliness, the tears (both shed and possibly more painful, unshed). I haven’t shared with you the breakdowns and the shutdowns and the ache of living with a vast chasm of pain and hurt between myself and the one I have loved for over a decade.

I’ve not talked about my husband, my girls, my home – the wanting to dive in and hold them tight and the desire to shut down, push them away and run, run, run – fast and fierce and far. I’ve neglected to mention my paralyzing fear, all the decisions that must be made, how my financial and logistical future seems tentative at best and perilous at worst. I haven’t once written about how I’ve spent the last several months sticking (nay, ramming) my head deep into the dry packed earth of my adopted desert home – hoping that if I ignore it all for long enough perhaps when I stand up again the storm will have passed me by and life will have returned to normal.

I have kept quiet about the fact that the knowledge of what I have done never, ever fully leaves me, that sometimes I can’t breathe with the weight of it squeezing my chest like a vice. I haven’t mentioned that in retrospect, the first part of this journey seems easy in comparison to the place I find myself now. I haven’t written that instead of feeling strong and confident and bold, I’ve been feeling fragile and brittle and confused beyond all belief. I certainly haven’t told you that I’m scared out of my fucking mind.

It’s been easier to write about the new, the euphoria, the rush of discovery and experience. Crushing, feeling, exploring, falling, blissing out on love. That’s the simple stuff. Even easier than that is not writing at all – staying in the surface of the moments and not daring to go any deeper the way writing demands. But I can’t keep doing that. As I mentioned before, the living of this and the writing of this are so hopelessly intertwined that I cannot possibly separate one from the other for long. If I don’t write, I don’t process and I certainly don’t move forward. I sit, I stagnate, I shrink into myself until I feel like a shell of the woman I know I have the power to become.

The time has come (past come, actually) to start moving again. My life demands movement, direction, forward motion – more than it ever has before. But I cannot move fully into the future until I deal fully with the past. I need to be honest, to own up to the harsh and the ugly and the terribly, terribly sad – and this is where I need to do it.

This blog is my therapy. My writing is my voice, my story, the truth of my journey. My fingers, my keyboard, my computer screen are my tools. And you, my lovely readers, are my wise council. For me, someone who has chronicled her life online for eight years now, all of these things are vital parts of the process.

But beyond all that, what it really comes down to is my heart. I can’t do what I need to do if my heart is on lockdown. I’ve got to bring it out of hiding, unwrap it and put it out there again. Not just for the good and wonderful and beautiful (because these past few months has been filled to overflowing with those things as well), but also for all the less than pretty things that I’d really rather not face. I need to step out of my safe little corner and into the light, sometimes soft and inviting, but often harsh and blinding. I need to tell you my stories, and need to know that you will hear me.

I need to write again. I’m starting now.

It’s Christmas Eve. We’ve just spent a rather lovely day together as a family, all things considered. Sure, there are moments of heaviness and intense discussion – there always are – but for the most part we’ve just been comfortably together today.

We debated attending church tonight for many reasons. This year marked the first year I have been able to own my lack of religion. I have tried throughout my life to make it real for me. I chased Christianity hard for a while with a yearning and craving for the sort of certainty I sensed in friends who were solid in their faith. I put on a mask and made a good game of pretend, but it was always insincere.

The affectations of this faith always felt hollow to me. Even as a child, growing up as the oldest daughter of a Protestant minister, there was always something missing – a big hole where my faith was supposed to live. That hole was always filled with nagging doubt, suspicion, and distrust. I’ve think I’ve always known that this was not my truth, but was never strong enough to admit it aloud.

The idea of attending Christmas services seemed hypocritical to me, the same way I feel rather counterfeit everytime I gloss over the answer to a religion related question from my daughter. But still, we decided to attend, believing that there was a need for some sort of tradition and predictability in the midst of the constant uncertainty of our lives. We have not successfully managed to replace Christianity with other spiritual beliefs (because I have not yet managed to fully understand or articulate my own and because S. is still fairly solid in his Christian faith), but we’ve always attended Christmas Eve services, and so we planned to attend this year as well. I thought it would be okay, but from the moment we took our seats in the pew I vacillated between sensations of suffocation and hyperventilation.

I felt like an utter and total fraud.

It wasn’t just the lack of religion. The questions about my beliefs were not at all new; I’ve attended numerous services able to simply enjoy the comfort of ritual in the absence of faith. Despite my lack of strong beliefs, I have always been able to pull a sense of serenity from the predictability and tradition of the church, from knowing what words to say, what music I would hear; there is a simple beauty of being in a place where you know all the rules (even when you don’t believe them).

No, it was more than my lack of religion.

I could imagine the picture we presented to the world. Two young parents and two adorable, if rather noisy and ragamuffin, kids. A close family bonded by love, just like any other in that church. I try to see us as we appear to the outside. I imagine what the rest of our night might look like from that outside view. If I had seen us – sitting together in that church – I would probably imagine that we’d go home and tuck our kids into bed with promises of Santa and presents. Next we’d arrange the gifts beneath the tree, and then sit in front of the twinkling lights with our arms around one another, comfortable in the certainty of our lives.

What nobody in that church could have possibly known was that we are a family on the verge of breakdown. That S. and I often alternate between clinging to our past in desperation and turning away from one another completely. That even at the best of times our interactions are bordered by the sort of tentative uncertainty that makes me forget that we’ve been best friends for over a decade. An outsider could probably sense the love between us, to me it is still such a palatable thing, a clearly visible current of emotion. Yes, the love is there, but someone looking in would probably have no idea that this love isn’t enough, not near enough, to sustain us.

At one point during the service I noticed a couple in front of us. They looked about our age, the man was rugged and handsome, the girl fresh-faced and naturally beautiful. He had his arm around her, his thumb absentmindedly stroking her shoulder or twirling her hair. She looked up at him every few moments with a loving gaze, her eyes clearly transmitting all the faith and happiness in the world. I wondered how long they had been together. One month? Ten years? Were they married? Were they happy? They were clearly in love, and that is when it struck me what truly separated us from them. While the love between S and I is undeniable, we are no longer ‘in love’ the way we have been for so very long. We are not one any more; we have begun the long and convoluted process of growing apart and moving on.

I looked over at him, and he looked so achingly handsome that it took my breath away. I wondered, as tears threatened to fill my eyes, why on earth can’t I want him the way I always did? Why can’t the love, and the memories and the life we had built be enough? Why is it that I need something different? Something more? How can someone be so close, and yet so far away?

And perhaps the biggest question of all, how do I move from feeling like a fraud, to finally feeling as if I am just being me?