Here's another thing that happened in 2012: I came out on Facebook. In the least creative way, on National Coming Out Day and by posting this picture. I don't know what a creative way would have been. Maybe a Lady Godiva-style ride through the village with a rainbow sash.
Apparently, it caused a kerfuffle, and included some speculation that it was a mid-life crisis, when Geoff, my husband, posted the question You're What? in response to my admission.
He was kidding.
It's not a mid-life crisis, and Geoff has always known.
GK 95
Here's my least favorite reaction, when you do tell people, and maybe this is why sometimes, I don't tell people: But, you're married.
That's right. I'm married, and I've been married for a long time. Almost 17 years, and we've been together since 1994. When we met, I was batting about 60/40 male / female on the dating. I was skeptical. Not because he was male, but because he was cool.
I got lucky. We belong together. Not because the government or the bible says so. Not because we are male and female. Because we are who we are. We are people who belong together. And for us, that was lucky. It meant we could get married without a battle. It meant that when we decided we wanted kids, we had them. (Which is lucky on more than one count; plenty of heterosexual couples can't, or have difficulty conceiving.) No one gave us a hard time.
But. It certainly wasn't a choice based on ease. In fact, I'm not even sure it was a choice. People are given to you. By what, you decide, or discover. Me, I prayed to the Virgin for my people. Both my partner and my kids.
So why bother saying it? Let me ask you this, you who have been married or partnered a long time, who are straight but still look at, desire or think about the opposite sex: you do sometimes think about the opposite sex, right? Guys: I know you look at women. Girls: Come on. We had a fair debate over Channing Tatum versus Ryan Gosling. Your desire for other than your partner does not fade away to nothing because you have paired off. You are still your own sexual being.
And so am I.
I've had significant relationships with women. I've fallen in love with women, and I've fallen in love with men. Here's one of my favorite quotes about it:
In itself, homosexuality is as liming as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation. -- Simone de Beauvoir
The first time I wrote and finished a novel I was sixteen. I wrote it in Mead notebooks in class, and sometimes at home. After I wrote the whole thing out in notebooks, I typed it on a plastic Smith Corona at a desk in the basement. I still have the desk (it's in my office). I still have the notebooks (they're in the attic). The Smith Corona is missing in action.
Yes, officer. I'm 16.
I would post a picture here of what I looked like at sixteen, but this should do it: I had an uncanny resemblance to the Les Miz poster. The picture on my first license looks just like that. Minus the flag.
Probably, the novel was ok. It was about a boy -- who was seventeen, had a single mom and some weird daddy issues. He was tall and beautiful, and had burgundy hair. He loved a girl, who was Ivory girl pretty, super smart, shy and bookish. Her parents were stuffy. They didn't like him or his looks or his single, cigarette smoking mom. They had sex. She got punished by her parents and was forbidden to see him. They ran away and her smooth talking, crazy -- did I mention crazy? -- boyfriend talked her into suicide, all while kind of ad hoc quoting some Keats.
I remember when I finished it. I was at the bar in my parents' house, and it was close to midnight on New Year's Eve. I remember that feeling of writing the last few words in pen, and closing the notebook.
Also, this is what I thought life was probably like. You meet a boy, you get in trouble, you have to die. No way out.
Heh. I'm so not changing the end of Daniel Deronda.
As far as I know, my mom knew I was writing it, but didn't read it. When I told her what it was about, and roughly how it ended. She told me -- very seriously -- that I had better change it.
Also, this wasn't the first novel. The first one -- same boy, slightly different circumstances -- involved the same single mom, but included her abusive boyfriend. This guy was an asshole. And the kid, he's so sweet, so pretty, so shy. He had a friend, too. A sassy younger kid, even prettier. The mom's boyfriend had a bad habit of beating the shit out of my character. Their apartment was grim, dark and run down. The porch slanted toward the street, and the kids had a habit of sneaking in and out of an upstairs window in the middle of the night.
This was eighth grade. My mom read parts of it, and told me -- matter of factly -- that perhaps the boyfriend was misunderstood. And maybe the mom was misunderstood too. Maybe she shouldn't be painted as such a terrible person for staying with the boyfriend.
My genesis for this triangle: David Copperfield. I was in love/hate with Mr. Murdstone. Plus, his name was Murdstone!
My mom's sensitivity: life. Except that I didn't know it. Sure I had gleaned some details from the past, and I'd first hand witnessed some violence. But I wasn't after her, or her story. I was writing my own. It was fiction.
As for the suicide, it was the biggest crescendo I could built. The biggest. And I was sixteen. I needed a big finish. There was no subtle and then they work things out in the moonlight for me. It was go big or go home. To die.
No one has told me I had better change anything -- for its being too close to the truth -- for a long time. But everyone still looks for themselves, still assumes they know where it came from and what it's about.
I have work quitting or at least work flipping out fantasies. Among the best of these: Tom Cruise's flip out in Jerry Maguire . . .
and my favorite, Jim Carrey's back to you, fuckers, from Bruce Almighty . . .
Last week, I gave up $10,000. And while I didn't exactly flip out, or flip anyone off, I did sort of come to a screeching halt.
Last spring I was contacted to offer a couple of creative writing courses at Syracuse University: a lucky break for me. It was part-time work (aka adjuncting) but it paid well, and . . well, it was SU. While I may have misgivings on the prestige of the big school for a lot of things (especially having gone to Le Moyne) I was not about to argue with the reputation of the creative writing program. Also, I could be teaching the next Lou Reed.
It went well. By which I mean to say, I liked it, but what I liked most about it was teaching creatively. I was also teaching a writing intensive on the interpretation of fiction: which is just what you think it is: a lot of interpreting, snow = death, inscribing pens = penises kind of thing.
In the fall, two sections of gender and lit opened up for the spring. Another writing intensive with even more pens, but with the added inscripted body, queer theory, and performativity too.
It was a lot of work. And a good opportunity to show my mettle: gender / queer theory would have been one of my field exams, had I finished my Ph.D.
Ok: I have a problem with quitting.
I did this once before, my first time around in graduate school, in 1996. I had lost my funding. My first year, I was fully funded, working as an editorial assistant for Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies (MRTS). When it closed, and moved from Binghamton, I was shit outta luck. In fact, that might be the official language of the English department. I remember a shrug, and a I dunno coming from the chair when I went in to ask where else they could place me.
So my second year, I took a full time job as a proofreader / styles editor at Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing. When I thought I was going to get to read all of the Norton Anthologies (and get paid $7/ hour) I instead got to read an entire textbook on bovine venereal diseases. Seriously, inflamed cow vulva is nothing to laugh at.
I was studying full-time, working full-time and by October, I was pregnant. By December, I had to quit something, and the only thing I couldn't quit was being pregnant. (Yes, I know I could have. The baby was planned. I know. Who plans a baby in grad school? I do.)
So I left everything. School (leave of absence). Work. Binghamton. I found I could do one thing right then and that was have this baby.
Now, fifteen years later, I'm in the same boat. After struggling through the middle school years and watching my brilliant, (yes, I said brilliant) under-motivated son go from top of his class in Liverpool to bottom of his class in Clinton,* I decided something radical needed to be done. In the midst of a whole lot of bullshit sometimes you need to focus on one thing.
I pulled him out of school.
No one at the school district knows what to do with him. When I say this, I mean I haven't gotten any idea or solution from them that says "lets try this" that isn't just punishment. He doesn't need punishment. He needs inspiration.
We're in the midst of liberating here. We're homeschooling. And unschooling. And for the time being, following our curiosity towards doing whatever the fuck we want. To facilitate this, I quit my two writing intensives for spring. My move was deemed "unprecedented" by the department.
Unprecedented because I pulled out so close to the start of classes. Also, I expect, because in a highly competitive academic milieu, leaving for family issues just makes you a mom, when they thought you were a professional. Unprecedented because how could you give up $10,000 to stop everything and figure out how to teach your most important student? If I were a legit, full-time employee I might have been able to finagle a leave of absence, but when you operate as a satellite, they just kind of cut you loose.**
As always, I second-guess myself. I asked for a lot of advice. I got a lot of advice. A lot of it was super helpful. And I'm still getting lots of advice. I expect it will continue. Everyone (but the school, apparently) has ideas about how to raise and teach a child.
We had a meeting with the principal and the guidance counselor last week. A meeting where I expected to be offered some insight, some proposal, but what I got instead was a version of them telling on him, and what the told me was what I already knew. What I was prepared to say, instead, and what we did say, in a longer, more formal way was I got this.
You know what, I got this. Thanks anyway. And for the time being, I have to let go and not feel bad about my unprecedented decision to stop teaching 60 students in favor of teaching one.
*I'm not pitching some east cost / west coast Liverpool / Clinton thing here. Chances are, he would have done the same thing in Liverpool. But the reality is that he never got the chance to shine at Clinton. He was tracked into mediocrity and stayed there, and partially, my gut tells me that's because no one tried very hard to get to know him or notice his particular understated sparkle. That's right. I said sparkle.
** Also, yes, I know I am privileged to be able to make this decision at all. In another household, mommy would just keep working, and junior would just keep failing. Losing 10k is hard for us, but it's not the end. I'm not the sole or even the main breadwinner. And I'm still teaching one class: the fiction workshop.
I've decided to sell my china. It's not a complete set, only some pieces, and I feel detached from it now. Years ago, however, after we got married, I was taken by Portmeirion's Botanic Garden pattern. It was English, and included not only butterflies and bees with the plants, but also the Latin names. At the time, I was reading a lot of A. S. Byatt, whose novel Still Life, includes a chapter called "Names of Grasses," listing both the English and Latin names. In many ways, the novel acknowledges the power of naming. Byatt says herself,
I had the idea, when I began this novel, that it would be a novel about naming and accuracy. I wanted to write a novel as Williams said a poem should be -- no ideas but in things (Byatt, Still Life, 323).
And,
That summer Marcus had a vision of the world as a globe marked out not only by flowing stripes of water and huge nets of roots, sliding sands and towering rocks, but by a kind of human love, not grabbing, not consuming, not even humanizing, but simply naming the multidinous things to be seen, for the sake of seeing them more clearly (Byatt, Still Life, 322).
It's hard to step back and simply call things what they are, simply name. I wasn't a china girl; I was more of a Chinet girl. We eloped. We were not in the category of couples who register and get china, or crystal, or fine silverware. When I look back, it's amazing we made it. Everything was an idea bigger than us. It's hard to enter into that, headstrong, and have the courage to simply name it. Someone might have named it dumb.
The Chapel of Love, Las Vegas
I wasn't raised in a culture of fanfare. Most of my attempts at ceremony, at celebration, at recognition were met firmly with an acknowledgment of my place: last. And in the mid-90s, I wasn't looking for a traditional wedding, in fact, had it been expected, I might have rejected the offer. I would have been happy with the rebellion of scaling back, of marrying outside the church, of wearing something not white.
But that's not who we are. My own parents were married in a courthouse, and truth be told, they probably would have advised me to do the same thing. Somehow, without much forethought, I saved us the uncomfortable You don't really want a wedding, do you? conversation, and eloped before it became much of an issue. I wouldn't trade the elopement. It was perfect. There was only us. It was only $200: pictures, flowers, limo and video included.
My rebellion is often reactionary. I wanted to go to church, and not just go -- but be confirmed, to be official. I wanted at least that recognition. I wanted to the pressure of going to college. I wanted to rebel by going to college for something I loved, not something that was practical. I wanted someone to know that I loved something, more than anything. I want to use the good china on holidays, and dress up. I want a tree with lots of lights, or two trees, as we've done for the past few years. I wanted ceremonies for my kids. Baptisms and First Communions. So they would know just how much they matter. Because we do matter. As Phil Memmer says in his poem, "You Are Worth Many Sparrows,"
We matter that much. We matter
that much, at the least.
They will rebel, of course, against fanfare. want to wear beanies at the table, or eat at TV trays in the living room. (An option not yet presented to them, but boy, if they knew they could.)
So why bother saying it? Let me ask you this, you who have been married or partnered a long time, who are straight but still look at, desire or think about the opposite sex: you do sometimes think about the opposite sex, right? Guys: I know you look at women. Girls: Come on. We had a fair debate over Channing Tatum versus Ryan Gosling. Your desire for other than your partner does not fade away to nothing because you have paired off. You are still your own sexual being.
