pronoia

Because Once Is Never Enough

A few months ago, some friends of ours invited us to their wedding. We looked at our finances, looked at our time, and thought we wouldn't go. But then they asked us to sign their ketubah, the Jewish wedding contract, because they admire our marriage. And who can say no to that?

The wedding was in Boston, and after a few weeks, it occurred to us that we could, in fact, make our own marriage legal. We had always said that if making it legal made a difference where we actually lived, we'd do it, and our state is considering maybe one day if no one looks at them cross-eyed recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other states. Given that we were going to be in Boston anyway, we decided to head up a few days early and do it.

Ms. P had called ahead to figure out how all of this was going to work, because Boston has a three-day waiting period and we weren't going to be around for that, what with the Monday holiday and everything. What we knew going in was that we had to spend the morning running around doing paperwork and we had a 2pm appointment with the City Clerk.

Bright and early at 9am we're at City Hall, where we fill out a bunch of forms, certify that we are not, in fact, related to one another, and pay a bunch of money. Then the lovely woman there sends us to the courthouse to get the waiver of the three-day waiting period. Only we're unfamiliar with Boston and her accent is, shall we say, very heavily working-class Bostonian, and so we're outside in the blowing wind having NO idea where we're going. So we wander around and finally find the courthouse, but we have no idea where we're going there either (and it's full of people doing probation things and being called to jury duty, all in this echoey old marble building), and we pick an office at random to ask, and of course that's where we're supposed to be.

More paperwork, more money, and we're sent to the courtroom to await the judge's judgment. We've been assured that there will be no problem, but I'm panicking that we didn't bring any proof that we've been together a long time, and we're preparing answers to questions about why we need the waiver. ("Well, Your Honor, our state is a little bit behind the times....") We wait through a lovely trans woman getting her name changed. (Ms. P didn't notice that she was trans, but her original name was Bruce Wayne something or other -- so that's my theory on the matter.) We wait through a guardianship hearing for a mentally ill person. Then the judge calls our name, we go to the front, the helper dude hands us our folder, says congratulations, and we leave. No conversation, no questions, no nothing. That part felt really surreal. More traipsing around the courthouse to get the appropriate paperwork finished.

At this point we're kind of hungry and tired, so we head back to the hotel room for room service and resting and getting all gussied up for the actual deed. But there's one more piece of paperwork we have to do -- taking the waiver back to the original woman at City Hall to actually get our license, and we have no idea how long that will take or how long the line will be at this hour of the day, so we leave an hour and a half to get there and get that taken care of. As we're leaving the hotel, the bellman says, "going out again?" and Ms. P, chatty girl that she is, says "oh yes, to city hall where we're getting married!" And the bellman, whose name, we find out, is George, gives us both enormous hugs and tells us congratulations and after asking how long we've been together kind of shakes his finger at us and tells us it's about time.

Of course, we get there and there's no line. Our lovely helper exchanges our paperwork for the license and then we're 75 minutes early for our legal ceremony. The people in the city clerk's office are happy for us to just go early, but our friends, the ones getting married on Saturday, are coming to witness and celebrate, so we wait. They get there about ten minutes before our appointment, complete with a bouquet of roses, and commence crying and picture taking.

We're expecting something pretty pro forma, given that this is the city clerk, but no. She sits us down and asks us how long we've been together, tells us that she's just confirming what is already real, and tells us this dear story about two women -- Virginia and Shirley -- that she had married over the summer. They were from our state as well, and when she asked them how long they'd been together, they'd said in unison "February 26, 1950." One was 84 and the other was 85, and they didn't think it would matter, but they went home and felt different and have been saying their vows to each other every day and wrote to tell her how meaningful it was.

So then she stood us up in front of the bookshelves and did a whole ceremony complete with speech and vows, and there was more crying and picture taking, and then Meghan and Tim took us out for drinks to celebrate. It was really lovely, and it was awesome to, in turn, get to sign their ketubah at their wedding and cry and take pictures and cheer.

Our whole second-wedding day was better than we could have anticipated, and we're feeling really blessed by it all.

Where have I been all my life?

I was on the train this morning, reading one of my favorite Enneagram books again. This mornings portion was, happily enough, the chapter devoted to my own ennea-type. And I was reminded, again, that one of my challenges, always, is to stay connected to my very own self, even while I'm running around happily redesigning websites and talking to clients and juggling two jobs and a marriage and some friends and and and.

And part of staying connected to myself is being here, with you. So here I am.

The era of insanity has, happily, ended, and we've settled into a much more reasonable life-routine that doesn't involve things like impromptu driving trips across the country.

In fact, the only traveling we're planning anytime soon is a trip to Boston for a friend's wedding. And since we'll be in Boston, and since the state we actually live in is considering (considering, mind you, don't hold her to this) recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other states, we're going to go up a little early, have a belated (*cough* 5 years later *cough*) honeymoon / vacation and actually make it legal. We've told everyone, but no one is invited. We're planning to buy flowers on the street, wear something pretty, and have someone take our picture.

I've been avoiding this space in part because I didn't know how to talk about our decision not to adopt. Not now, and probably not ever. Parenting -- the idea of parenting, planning to parent -- took up such a huge space for me, and it's no longer on the table.

What we said, when we made the decision not to go directly into the domestic pool when our home study was done, was that with Ms. P going back to school full-time and then going to seminary, we didn't have the time or the money right now. And while that was true, it wasn't the whole truth.

The truth is, we hit a fork in the road of our lives. On the one side was parenting and on the other was seminary and life coaching and the utter transformation of our lives and our selves. But it also wasn't as simple as a choice between them, because our parenting options had, as all of you well know, been reduced to adoption. And, more and more, we were uncomfortable with it.

In my wide and varied blog reading, I had -- and still have -- blogs from people at all angles of the adoption triad. I read what first moms have to say, what adult adoptees have to say, and what adoptive parents have to say. And we could not escape the truth that at the heart of adoption, always, is loss, no matter how wonderful and open and supportive the adoptive parents are, no matter how much contact there is. And we could not escape the truth that adoption is powered by the money paid by adoptive parents and that, in the vast majority of cases, the women choosing to relinquish their children could parent and could parent well if they had different kinds of support available to them. And in the end, we were not comfortable supporting a system that, in our view, is exploiting vulnerable women and children for the desires of the privileged few. No matter what it felt like.

I can't say there's not still grief around it, because there is. I can't say I don't get sad around babies and pregnancy announcements, because I do. But that chapter of our life, barring some incredibly unusual and unforeseen circumstance, is over. We are past the fork in the road.

When did my life become unmanageable?

I keep thinking nothing much is going on in our lives, but then I talk to someone else and their response -- inevitably resembling a stunned ox -- makes me think I'm wrong.

So you can play along at home, here's what's been going on.

• My sister decided around the beginning of July to move to the city our parents live in by the middle of August.
• She then commenced getting her condo ready to sell, which involved a Saturday of packing up extraneous stuff and hauling it to the other end of the complex to the storage pod.
• My boss is out on paternity leave, meaning I'm both doing my job and pretending to be him, including shepherding a politically dicey project through to completion.
• My sister's nanny stopped showing up. A lovely cousin of ours offered to take care of the babies as soon as the bar exam was over. We set up a complicated schedule of taking turns working from home with babies, which, while possible, is really freaking hard.
• The "check engine" light comes on in the car. Ms. P enlists R's help and they take it to the spa, where it needs over $1,000 worth of work. Three days later, a tire goes flat.
• Ms. P is working really hard to improve her academic writing skills in accordance with her teacher's feedback, and proceeds to spend a week thinking about nothing other than her paper.
• Our parents are piling complications into the logistical process of moving my sister, and it takes several phone calls to come up with a plan that is least likely to make her head explode and yet gets her, her two babies, her car, and all of her stuff half way across the country without significant time away from work. For anyone.
• Lovely Cousin finishes the bar exam, and my sister and I spend an evening breaking into her apartment to leave her treats (complete with babies and Cousin's dog) and then racing across town so I can make an appointment.
• Eldest Cat is, still, again, unwell.
• Ms. P applies for and gets a hotline operator job, which will not only help our finances (goodbye, one salary) but will help structure her time and get her out of the house.
• Lovely Cousin commences baby-caretaking, but has learned only after the bar exam is over that her father has had a heart attack and she really needs to go home. And home is 800 miles away.
• Sister and I once again set up a schedule of working from home and taking care of babies.
• The current plan for getting her to New City involves her and I driving next weekend and flying me home immediately. The following weekend I go to Phoenix as part of my life coach training. The weekend after that SIL and Nephew 1 come to play. At some point I will supervise movers as they collect all of her stuff to ship it to New City where, hopefully, she'll have a new house that is NOT walking distance from my parents.

And I wonder that I'm overwhelmed?

Of course, all of this is also bringing up big feelings -- fears about my relationship with my sister, which has finally gotten good; complicated sadness about the babies leaving; residual crap about leaving academia as I work on the coaching business; stress about money -- and I barely have time to breathe right now, much less figure any of it out.

But it will all still be here when Labor Day arrives and I hibernate to recover.

Emerging from the fog

I'm beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel -- and to trust that it's not just an incoming train.

A few weeks ago, I got treated for a sinus infection, and I'm wondering just how long I'd had it, because as it faded, I could feel my energy getting better. Not all the way to well -- no, I've still got appointments with both an allergist and an endocrinologist in the next ten days -- but better. Well enough to take the odd short walk. Well enough to actually attempt to garden the other day. (That ended with a strained back, which was annoying, but hey, I did something!)

I'll take better. Really.

As better is happening, I'm finding myself returning to things I'd gotten away from -- I've read more books in the last two weeks than I had the previous two months. We did garden, and we're planning a new perennial bed in place of a stupid chunk of yard in front of the house. We cleared out a lot of old clothes, and I've got plans to keep getting rid of junk.

It's nice to get glimpses of myself again.

End of an Era

Today we discovered that Luna, the last of my water turtles, had passed away. At one point I had eight water turtles, but in the intervening years they had all either been released into the wild or passed on, and she was the only one left, gliding through her tank and begging for food.

She was also my first turtle, with Hal. She was the one who, as a hatchling, was ill and didn't eat. The vet laughed at me when I brought her in, because she was just so tiny (only an inch long) that he couldn't take vitals or look up her nose or anything, but he wormed her and she improved and started eating and growing. At the very beginning we feared for her life, so the fact that she outlived everyone else was notable.

So now, after all of the ponds and tanks and filters and rocks, I'm going to live in a house without falling water. It's going to be very quiet.

Family, Family, Family

A month or so ago, my mother emailed me to ask if I'd consider flying to Texas for a weekend to help get my sister and her twins there for a visit. Apparently you can only have one lap child per lap, and anyway, the twins were only two months old or so, and while one pair of arms will do usually, traveling really needs two.

Of course, I said yes. Besides just wanting to help out my sister, who's doing amazingly well, all things considered, I hadn't seen my grandmother in years, and she's already 98. As it turns out, I ended up being how my sister got home again, instead of how she got there in the first place, so on Friday I swooped in for a quickie visit.

In many ways it was the perfect length of time for a visit. I got in late enough on Friday that I could say hi, steal my laptop back from my father, and go to bed. Saturday my grandmother came over, as did my favorite cousin and her husband and kids. Sunday I spent visiting my coaching buddy and my best friend from my academic job. And Monday we packed, ate lunch, and left.

All in all, it went well. But now, afterwards, I've got all kinds of conflicting emotions. Sadness and frustration with my dad, who can't seem to figure out how to actually talk to me and so tends to accidentally insult me from his position of the-lack-of-the-gold-standard-is-the-cause-of-everything-bad. Feeling glad I got to see my grandmother, who gave me her copy of a geneology of her maiden name, which Ms. P and I took as our legal last name. Happy to see my cousin and meet her kids after far too many years (seriously, the oldest is finishing kindergarten). Alienation from these people who spend a lot of time seriously discussing Survivor.

While I was there, I was so aware of my actual energy levels, of how drained I was by the late afternoon each day, how what I needed more than anything was just to sit quietly and read or surf the 'net. I managed it, mostly, but I was also aware of how little my family really gets my health stuff, no matter how much they ask about it and I tell. I don't look sick, so they don't think I am.

But then again, I've spent how long trying to act like even if I am sick, it won't matter? It's not entirely their fault.

Still, it's good to be home, to be surrounded by all of the stuff that matters to me.

I need a schedule!

Because wow, blogging in two places is really hard to keep up with. Must structure myself!

I kind of left you hanging there with the dog story, huh? Well, here's what happened next.

As time passed and no owner showed up, we kept on loving on the dog and talking about it -- round and round, truly -- and decided that if no one showed up, we would try to integrate the dog into our pack. We were nervous about this, because Grace doesn't like other dogs, and because three is often the number at which dogs become a true pack, and we were worried about the cats. But we were going to do it.

For help, we asked our lovely pet sitter -- who fosters animals all the time -- to come over and help us introduce everyone. We figured she had more experience than we did. But she was out of town until Tuesday, so she would come over then.

But Monday night, we were supposed to get a HUGE line of thunderstorms. It was all weather warnings and such, and there was no way we felt comfortable leaving the pup outside in that, however comfy he was any other time. So Ms. P hauled him off to the vet to get checked out and vaccinated. The vet thought he'd been out a long time, by the looks of him, and he had a massive ear infection. And he kept marking the exam room, which neither of us was overly thrilled about. But she brought him home and we made plans to keep him in the basement overnight until the lovely pet sitter could come over. And, I kid you not, 30 minutes after she got home, Animal Control called because the owner had called them and they finally put both reports together and came up with a match.

So Duke, as it turns out he was named, got to go home with his totally adorable owner, and we didn't end up with 3 dogs. But our animal karma is pristine.

In other news, my endo is acting up, so I've got an appointment on Wednesday. I've pretty much resigned myself to birth control pills, but oh, the irony! I'm also doing acupuncture, and that's helping unbelievably much.

The life coaching stuff is going well and I'm still madly excited about it, so that's awesome. I've been actually coaching people, and their positive responses are helping get me through the paralyzing fear I get periodically. Me, opening my own business? Gah!

And finally, I'm flying to my parents this weekend to see my grandmother, spend some time with two friends, and help my sister get the twins back to town. So that should be ... interesting!

Breaking my heart

Saturday evening, while Ms. P and I were draped over various bits of furniture, trying to keep down the head-cold-induced moaning, the lovely young man who mows our lawn showed up with a dog in tow.

He'd found the dog wandering around the neighborhood, collared but without tags. His mom wouldn't let him bring the dog home, even to try to find owners, and he didn't want to take him to a shelter, so we stashed him in our fenced-in backyard and proceeded to put the word out.

We posted to Craigslist and our neighborhood listserve. We trolled lost and found websites. We faxed a Found Animal Report to Animal Management, so if someone called looking for the dog, they'd know where to go next. This morning Ms. P took him to our vet to see if he's microchipped (he's not). I called around to all the vets in the area to leave a description and our phone number.

This dog is the sweetest dog ever -- friendly, well socialized, gentle-mouthed. When I took him his breakfast this morning, he jumped around in circles when he smelled what I had in the bowl. When we heaved him into the car for the trip to the vet, he stuck his head between our seats and licked my cheek.

It's not much of an exaggeration to say that I, and we, love pretty much all dogs. We're always pointing them out to each other as we drive around, making silly dog-specific cooing noises at them through the windows.

But it's also true that this dog, this is a dog that is Our Kind of Dog -- of lab extraction once upon a generational time, medium-sized, black (and black dogs are really hard to place), gentle, friendly. He is the Ur-Dog for us.

Ms. P has named him (Scooter) at the same time that she says, sobbing, that we can't have a third dog. We're diligently looking for his people, and we really, really hope we can find them. If we can't, and if the neighbor who has expressed a little interest in him doesn't, actually, in the end want him, then we're in a bit of a pickle. He doesn't fit our plans or our budget.

I want to say, "but what life ever does?" Right now we're holding the line while our hearts break, over and over. Wish us finding him his people or, barring that, a home we feel really great about. We need all the help we can get.

Has my calendar been flipping pages again?

I am losing track of time at a truly alarming rate.

Part of it is that I am happily, ecstatically, even, getting this life coaching business off the ground, and working what is essentially two jobs at the same time is, well, time-consuming. Not to mention attention-consuming, emotion-consuming, and just generally consuming.

Add to that my sister's babies, visiting Midwest Really Big City to check out the seminary Ms. P wants to go to (and meeting Frog!), planning various trips to various places, and I can't believe it's the middle of April already.

All of which is to say, you are all on my mind, and I am still reading blogs like crazy. And I will try to be better about letting you know what's up with me, and quite a lot is. And if you want to know more about the life coaching, including its website and very own blog, just email me.

Mwah!

Us, unleashed.

So, I believe I mentioned a while back that Ms. P quit her job. She's been looking for another one, but nothing is manifesting yet, and the difference between how she was with that job and how she is without that job are so profound that, unless we absolutely can't pull it off, neither of us think she should take a job "just because."

I mean, she's in school now, and she'll be full-time starting this summer, and the long-term plan is for her to go to seminary. Anything other than a job that is totally aligned with this plan is going to slow her down.

A moment from When Harry Met Sally. Harry and Sally have had a falling out, and he's been trying to apologize and repair things, but she's just too angry. So he corners her at a New Year's Eve party and tells her he loves her. And when she tells him that he can't just tell her that to make himself feel better, he says, "And it's not because I'm lonely. And it's not because it's New Year's Eve. But when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible."

She's figured out the vocation she wants to spend the rest of her life with. And she wants the rest of her life to start as soon as possible.

My fears about this have been twofold. First, money. Duh. We like it. Our bank likes it. Our landlords like it. But second, I have worried that her being home would turn into the Depression Chronicles: all sleeping the day away on the couch.

But it hasn't been like that at all. Oh sure, there's been the odd nap on the couch, but the odd nap on the couch doesn't worry me. She's done homework and housework and research and crafted a really great morning routine for herself, one that prioritizes spirituality and attention to her self.

In the month since she's been out of the office, I've seen her blossom, and I want this for her.

And so we're looking at our finances again. My take-home salary has gone down a little bit because I put her on my insurance -- and because, being queer, we're taxed on what the company pays for her insurance (don't even get me started!). I'm less and less interested in doing financial writing, mostly because I'm being utterly entranced with the life coaching business that is rapidly happening -- much more rapidly than I was anticipating, actually!

It's not a given that she won't have to take make-work for us to make it all work, but we spent some time today talking about what we could get rid of / cut back to help. And it occured to me that we could get rid of our cell phones. We're 1.5 years into a 2 year contract, and I seem to remember there being something about being able to cut out of the contract early without penalty assuming we made it past six months or something. So we're going to look into that.

And I have to say: the very IDEA of getting rid of the cell phone is filling me with joy. Visceral, embodied joy. No more being leashed to the temporal demands of others! No more having multiple people on the phone at once! Once upon a time, the cell phone enhanced my life -- and now it's just another leash to a world I don't want to be part of.

When, only two months ago now, we said we'd try paring back our expenses for a month and see how we did, we had no idea that it would catapult us into being this much closer to the lives we want to live this fast. It's mind-boggling. It's beautiful, and mind-boggling, and utterly expansive.