back in the us…

Hey everyone…

So we had an uneventful trip back, excepting the 65-mph winds coming off the ocean taking off out of the UK.  I could have completely lost it and cried and cried as we flew away, but I mostly kept it together.  

Landing in Boston was fine.  We met up with the MIL and that was fine too.  What became clear as we got settled into her house was that we are in trouble, that she’s not happy with us.  Not happy with the apartment search (which, crossing fingers and knocking on wood, was successful…), not happy with us being out of the house doing our own thing.  Asking us to do weird errands for her, not making dinner for us, just being (pardon my language) a jerk.  

But we’re surviving.  M. is handling it really well (I suspected she would) and we’re both trying to be respectful but firm about our boundaries.  And we’re not doing ANYTHING on her home computer, so as not to be discovered.  So my internet presence will be sparse for the next week or so, but I’ll be back with guns blazing as soon as we’re out of the hell-hole that is suburban wealthy NH.  God I had forgotten how much is sucks…it’s fascinating how different and wonderful life is just 40 miles east of here, in Boston, where one can be one’s self with a minimum of fuss.  Lots of gorgeous queer women on the sidewalks, selling coffee, riding their bikes…yeah, it’s not so bad to be back.

Well, wish me luck surviving, and we’ll be in NY for the dyke march so keep an eye out for two awkward-looking-jet-lagged queers!

the shortest night

We spent the evening with our awesome British friends.  We had to drag ourselves away because they have plans for (today) and needed to get to bed.  I could have stayed there all night just looking at them.  We got home around 2:30 and M. went to bed.  I just couldn’t — I really wanted to see the sun rise.  So here I am, at 4:15 in the morning, watching the sun come up on our last full day here. 

It started to get light at 3:30, and now it’s almost fully light outside.  It’s just amazing.  I’m not the only person staying up — across the way there are plenty of lights on, and people are roaming the streets yelling and shouting as they do around here.  

I think I feel numb about leaving.  I wonder if I’ll cry.  In December when we got on the airplane leaving Boston from our Christmas visit we both cried from the sadness of leaving and coming back here.  It was really hard at first.  Stepping back into this apartment felt grim and difficult.  Not long after we got back M. went on a research trip to London, and when she got back she didn’t even kiss me hello.

The sky is beautiful now, swirled with gold and rosy pink.  It’s 4:25am.  

Then I took my exams for the first semester, and went right back into classes.  And M. went on her next research trip, a longer one this time.  And when she got back, she had done some thinking.  Somewhere deep inside her the dam burst, though it would take a while for the information to push its way out to me.  Nonetheless, the signs were there:  when she got back she kissed me hello.

And then, and then, and then:  we went out to dinner with our awesome British friends and seeing them, an out lesbian couple doing their thing, was too much for M.  (being taken for straight by some colleagues was also a blow)  She bought a men’s shirt at the store the next day, put it on, and decided that all of her other shirts had to go. 

We lived in CA for a while right after college.  We lasted 5 months.  M. was completely miserable; she had a horrible job, and she was really devastated by missing her family. (I had no such difficulties, always finding it a relief to be far away from mine).  We had made a crazy plan to take the train back east for Christmas (sensing a theme here? plus it was 2001, and everyone was wary of flying.) but it was really expensive.  Given how miserable she was, I bit the bullet and said ‘let’s leave now.  Forget about the train — call movers and let’s get out of here.’  So we did.

The sky is striped pink and lavender now.  Everything I can see is glowing rosy gold.  It’s 4:31am.

We lasted five months in CA, and the dam broke in M. after six months here in the UK.  Before that she was miserable here.  I truly wonder if all this would have happened the better part of a decade ago if we had stayed just a bit longer.  If we had refused to travel for Christmas and maintained our distance from our eastern relatives.  Who knows.  Counter-factuals are never really that helpful in my opinion.  

4:38, and it’s light enough to have a picnic in the park.  Instead, I’m going to put myself to bed.  I wonder why new year’s day isn’t today.  It feels like a day of new beginnings, of new possibilities.  Whatever happens tomorrow, when we finally land in Boston, when M. has to look her mom in the face and deal with the here and now of her newly fraught relationship, it will take place in the glow of the love and happiness we’ve found here.  With the memory of spending time with our friends fresh in our minds and hearts.  

yeah baby!

I cut my own hair!  And just to prove it, I’m posting the picture of what I took off at 11:30 last night:

I still have a fair bit left…it’s hitting around jaw length now.  Not so drastic as it might have been, but doing it myself was a bit of a departure from the norm!  Now I have to decide if I want to dye it…

I must say that google didn’t really help me with this project; the websites I found ranged from this (taking itself very seriously) funny website endorsing the ‘indie’ scene, to this truly scary site promoting jesus chic. Yikes!  I think the overall look I’m going for is ‘not straight’.  And guess what?  There aren’t too many websites out there with a how-to.  I’m working blind here.

On another note, it was interesting to hold that ponytail in my hands and realize how soft and smooth my hair is.  Somehow when it’s hanging off my head I don’t touch it or look at it the same way.  I feel like I finally understand why M. loves it so much.  Good thing she doesn’t mind me cutting it shorter again…as long as there’s enough to grab and pull…

etiquette…?

So these are the situations that Miss Manners never dreamed of, right?  Our straight friend is getting married this fall, and her mom is throwing her a bridal shower.  Both M. and I have been sent invitations (separately) to said shower.  We are almost certain that we are the only lesbians on the list, and, well, we are technically married to each other.  Really as married as two women get in the US but that’s a post for another day.

So my understanding is that bridal showers are meant to be ‘girls only’, an opportunity for girly ribaldness and insensitive innuendo about various marital realities.  [This may be showing my preoccupation with days gone by and not an accurate reflection of contemporary culture, and corrections are very welcome.]  There are two flies in the ointment of bridal bliss:

1.  Over the past few months, M. has become a lot more masculine in both appearance and attitude.

2.  We have (though staying together) taken off our wedding rings.  These rings were made by the same jeweler who’s making our friends’ rings, due to my recommendation, so that’s a bit awkward as well.  What do I say in response to the inevitable question of show and tell?  ’Oh, we decided we felt trapped and confined within the narrow definition of marriage that we feel the rings symbolize so we took them off.  Congrats on your engagement and don’t those rings look pretty………….’  How about this one:  ’Oh my goodness, I wonder where it’s gotten to?’

Should we both go?  Is it weird for a couple to go to a straight bridal shower?  Is it weird if the couple are both female?  Is it weird if one is butch?  What’s the gender shakedown at a bridal shower?  Will M. feel hopelessly out of place (yeah, right, more than she usually does)?  Should we each give a gift, or can we give a joint one like we would at the actual wedding?  What should we say about the rings?  I’m not putting it back on, that’s for sure…

Suggestions and opinions welcome.

back online!

Well we spent this past 5 days in London doing what one does in London (walking miles and miles, looking at museums, spending way too much money on nothing, checking out gorgeous girls, etc…) which accounts for my silence here.  Sorry to leave on such a downer, but the good news is that since the roller coaster metaphor is unfortunately accurate, the down was followed by an up that left me sore but happy during our stay in the big city.

London is one of the few places on earth where I feel like I can be myself.  It’s hard to describe the feeling exactly, but I am comfortable there.  Old buildings, interesting people, the style on the streets is smart and sexy and elegant, and the bookstores are plentiful and amazing.  London reminds me more of Boston than NY, but on a much, much bigger scale.   And frankly, it’s a lot better than Boston in just about every way except that we can’t afford to live there.

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It’s just one week until we leave for the US, and it’s getting harder and harder.  No part of me wants to go back.  I’m holding on to the thought of our trip to NY for the dyke march for dear life, where we’re scheduled to meet up with Belle!  I must say that going to the march was one of the reasons I pushed to come back to the US so early, and I’m really excited that it’s working out.  I was disappointed to miss Boston Pride, so thanks NY for scheduling it late…

And there are other good things about going back — a major one is getting our cats back.  I’ve missed them so much.  I’m sure they’ll make appearances here once we’re all living in the same space again.  Life just doesn’t feel the same without them.

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M. is pretty convinced that there’s going to be a huge conflict with her mom around our plans to find an apartment right away (as opposed to living there for longer) and I don’t really know how to help her deal with it.  I think we’ll just have to feel our way through it one step at a time, but it’s uncharted territory and that’s scary.  It’s rough to have to admit that someone you used to trust absolutely doesn’t actually have your best interests at heart, and maybe never really did at all.  

I sometimes wonder if M. is obsessing too much over this, and in the event it will actually be okay.  But maybe that’s just a naive hope on my part — M. knows her family much better than I do.  I’m in the interesting position (for the first time ever!) where my family looks good in comparison to hers.  I know, tough to imagine!  My mom is trying really hard to be nice, which is sort of touching.  I think she feels bad about her visit here this past fall — which induced me to panic attacks that lasted for months — though of course I never told her that — and she might even be genuinely excited about our return.  So I’m not too worried about my family.  But M. ends up in a tailspin of panic after she talks to her mom that takes hours to recede.  In a way it’s good to process some of this now, to be better prepared for things when we’re all face to face, but it’s really hard for me to figure out how to help her.   

the rollercoaster

At times it feels like we are in a spectacular nuclear meltdown around here.  The highs are high but the lows are abominable.  We probably shouldn’t have segued into having sex tonight, since emotions were running so high, but what can you do.  Sometimes it seems like a good idea when it’s not.  

At dinner, after a nice day, I found myself acting strange and artificial and wishing I was somewhere else.  I looked up at her and burst into tears, realizing that exact moment that I was crying simply because I could tell how upset she was and because of the incredible level of stress in the room.  This is really much harder than I thought it would be.

Any other two people would have broken up already.  Sometimes we used to joke about it being a higher love, like exaltation.  But love like that can turn into a choking sandstorm sometimes; we care so much about each other, and know each other so well, that sometimes it’s almost impossible to tell the other what we need most.  It’s like the reaction plays out so far in advance in my head, and I know exactly which of her insecurities and deepest fears that my needs will play into, that I can’t say anything about them.  But of course I could be wrong.

jealousy

Another thing I thought was interesting about The Well of Loneliness is that age-old issue:  the femme going off with the guy thing.  Now I don’t know about you other femmes out there, but my gf has historically been violently jealous of straight men who seemed to be interested in me or who I happened to know socially.  [small digression here to say that there are basically no men I've been friends with who haven't stepped into the attracted to me category at least at some point.  Reason #1 why I don't have any male friends.  I mean, what am I doing wrong?]  M. has lost it on numerous occasions after I had what I thought was a completely boring and platonic interaction with a man.  [This was a huge dynamic in our early relationship -- she's calmed down a lot over this, even before the recent doings.]  

Recently she confessed that she thought for years that I would eventually ‘realize her shortcomings’ and leave her for a straight man.  And I have to say, really???  Did I ever give that impression?  Because sure I’ve thought of leaving her, but only for another woman…  Seriously, I’d date another femme bottom before dating a straight man.  I have negative interest in men.  So I thought it was interesting that Hall seems to have the same opinion — femmes really ultimately are likely to end up with men, and in fact should, for their own comfort and safety.  [I'm not defending Hall's book -- there are some dreadful stereotypes -- but it is a classic and some of it is very relevant...]

Even more surprising to me is now that M. is no longer in denial about her gender identity, she’s fine with me thinking other women are hot, and even getting crushes on them.  Which I do all the time, and always have.  I don’t mean anything big by it, but to me it’s exciting to have a crush on someone even though I have absolutely no intention of acting on it.  Note the fruit-seller.  M. has seen her, and thinks it’s cute that I like her so much. Granted, she’s got big blue eyes and curly hair and pale skin with a sprinkling of freckles, and a generally tough attitude — what I’m trying to say is that M. recognizes herself in this girl.  [So I have a type! nothing wrong with that -- M. always goes for the curvy blonde.  Every time.]

I told her that this tolerance is funny, that there was never anything that could have induced me to leave her for a man, but if this girl came after me and tried to seduce me I’d have a harder time saying no.  So technically M. is in far more danger of losing me to this girl than a man, and yet she looks upon my infatuation as ‘cute’.  Is it because she feels that she can compete?  She can prove her superiority to the fruit-seller, but not a straight man?  Because in my opinion there is no question that she [both of them!] is far superior to any straight man.

I guess the part that always got to me about the jealous of men thing is that it somehow implies that I’m not really gay, and this ties back to Hall’s book.  Somehow by being more classically ‘feminine’, I’ve lost my ‘lesbian’ credentials and I’m just a ‘normal girl gone wrong’.  Which of course I strongly reject — but I think that femmes in general are easier for society to picture sleeping with a man (because we get the gender ‘right’ perhaps?) and our lovely masculine-identified women that we love and cherish so much are still part of society and so on some level they buy into this attitude.  Just a little bit.  Well, that and they also are being told that they don’t deserve and shouldn’t try to have a female lover, so that’s part of it too.  But this attitude carries within it the same stupid thing that everyone always says to lesbians:  ”well if you just found the right man…”

 No thanks.  I’ll keep my gold star.  And watch out for that fruit-seller;)

happiness…

I took my last exam today!  Hallelujah!  I am free of schoolwork until the fall.  Unless I failed my exams.  But I’m not thinking about that right now…

And I’ve been taking study breaks by reading all the old novels that any self-respecting queer woman should have read years ago — Orlando, The Well of Loneliness [**spoiler alert**], Stone Butch Blues — and learning a lot.  I was sort of surprised by John Hall’s take on femmes — so butches are the ‘real’ lesbians and the femmes who love them are just ‘normal’ girls gone wrong?  Umm, no.  And I don’t think we’d all have an ‘easier’ time with a man, either.  Perhaps that Mary is really bi, but I don’t want to think so.  It’s a pretty heartbreaking scene there at the end when Stephen lies…but that’s all I’m going to say, since perhaps there are others out there like me who wait years and years to read these things.

I loved Orlando, for the sheer fun of it, though I thought it fell apart about 75% through the 19th century.  Up to that though I couldn’t ask for a better read.  I feel like she must have inspired Sarah Waters a bit.

And Stone Butch Blues:  what can I say?  I spent the first week after reading it alternately wanting to run away from or viciously murder every straight guy I saw.  Now you all know that I don’t get along with them in the best of times, so it’s not too much of a stretch, but seriously.  It also made me feel real anxiety when looking at M., and realizing how much more she has to fear from the outside world if she’s going to be herself unapologetically.  

And that’s kind of what I appreciated about TWoL.  It really expressed the antagonism of the straight world, how being gay is sort of never really completely okay with vast swathes of humanity (perhaps that word is unwarranted here though).  How people pull away, look askance, let things slide — a million small slights that are intended to hurt, to show us that we’re ‘different’.  Yeah, so what — isn’t everyone?  Aren’t we all supposedly unique and special?  I was complaining the other day about how most people are vanilla, and it’s up to us to find people who aren’t, and M. said “no, it’s just that most people hide behind being vanilla so as not to offend others.”  Because probably most people aren’t really vanilla boring people, and it is just more convenient and customary to operate on that level.  It’s convenient to hide their differences.  But not really a possibility for those of us who are this different, without inducing a lot of misery.  But at least we’re at the point where we can sometimes live freely as ourselves without being shunned.  Here’s to progress!