Boyfriend | this woman's work

I know what this means

The Story of My Life, Writing 5 Responses »

Jul 302010

There are these two ex-boyfriends I sometimes dream about and the symbolism for both of them is absolutely clear to me. The first boyfriend appears when I am thinking about my most creative self. He represents my urge to chuck it all and go tearing selfishly around the world living only for my want to write. The second one shows up whenever I’m struggling with my creative career. He represents my need for professional accomplishment as a writer. Back in my youth, I thought that when I was dreaming about them that I was dreaming about THEM but then in my thirties (I think?) I realized I was really dreaming about myself and since I’ve figured that out, it’s made those dreams much more useful to me.

Last night I had a dream about the second one and it was so transparent.

The first part of my dream, I was in his apartment with another writer friend of mine who is at home with small children (younger than mine) and we were discussing her resume and how to work it to help her go back to this career that has nothing to do with writing (and which she’s never had in real life). We were talking about how to structure her resume so that she could get a job that would meet her practical needs (financial, parental and personal) but still give her time to write. You know, like what I’m hoping school will be for me. The ex-boyfriend was sitting at a table away from us scribbling away on notepaper and I leaned in and and said to her, rolling my eyes, “It’s easier for him. He doesn’t have to compartmentalize everything like we do.”

Then in the second part of my dream, I came back through his apartment like the way you might walk through a bus station. This time I was holding Madison’s hand and she was a very little girl. I was holding her hand tightly because I was afraid that she might get into trouble or get hurt in the apartment but at the same time, I wanted her to see the apartment and I wanted the ex-boyfriend to see her. Then I cut through the front door and was relieved that she was still with me.

I mean, really. So transparent.

So the ex-boyfriend is my professional writing career and the conversation in the first part is about feeling resentful that I can’t give the time to my writing career that I’d like to (but also feeling hopeful) and the second part is worrying — as I always worry — that my kids will not get what they need or that I will not get what I need.

I have dreams that are about these things ALL THE TIME. It’s the story of my life. It’s the story of lots of lives (maybe yours).

I find these dreams very comforting even though nothing gets resolved. I find them comforting because they are an acknowledgment of my struggle. Sometimes when I’m feeling excessively grouchy I’ll have a dream and understand that my grouch has to do a bigger frustration than having to wash the towels twice because I left them too long in the washer and they got mildewed. Those dreams are a reminder of my SELF and that I need to keep an eye on that part of me and pay attention to it and remember to nurture it.

The fact that these are ex-boyfriends getting all symbolic up in my dreams also made me think about how pre-Brett I dated boys who had something I wanted. I dated boys who I wanted to be like and then I decided that maybe I would quit looking for these qualities in a partner and instead start looking for these qualities in myself. And then when I started doing that I met Brett. Or more like my heart was open for meeting Brett who is his own self and not an imaginary who-I-want-to-be. Brett enhances my life and enhances me while before those relationships — through no fault of the guys who were in them with me — left me feeling frustrated and insecure and unhappy. It makes sense though because you can’t marry someone to fill up your empty spaces; you have to find someone who gives you the strength and ability and encouragement to fill those spaces up yourself.

Look at that. I started writing about dreams and I ended up writing about marriage. Such is the wandering mind unleashed on a journal, eh?

Open Adoption Roundtable #17: Secrets Not Kept

Adoption 22 Responses »

Jun 242010

Are there any things that you don’t want the other members of your triad to know—or that you don’t want to know about them? I’ve heard first mothers talk about not sharing their birth stories with adoptive parents because those are for the adoptees and for themselves only. Ive also heard of adoptees concealing their reunions from adoptive parents so as not to cause them pain. What don’t you want shared in your adoptive relationships?

via Open Adoption Roundtable #17 : Production, Not Reproduction | A blog about open adoption.

I was just talking about this to Julia today.

As most of you know, I’ve come by my adoption politics first very generally, picking around what I was learning about adoption and thinking about it from the context of my feminism. Then, after we adopted Madison, it all became more deeply personal for me because my relationship with Pennie grew and strengthened and I was forced to reconsider some of what I believed. For me, the result has been that I look back through a critical lens that I simply didn’t have access to at the start of our journey.

I am not antiadoption. I do not regret being Madison’s mother by adoption. I do not believe that I have the right to decide whether or not Pennie’s decision was ultimately the “right” one or the “wrong” one. I’m not saying any of that. I am saying this: I would not want my daughter to have the experience that her first mother had and if I had known then what I know now, my participation would have looked very different.

This isn’t a surprise to any of you, not if you’ve been reading. And it may not mean what you think it means because for me to detail what I would have done differently would mean I would have to share things I can’t share (that I have no right to share). It also doesn’t mean that I extrapolate my experience to anyone else’s experience. My feeling are specific, wrapped up in my participation in THIS story and in THESE people’s lives.

Here we get to the prompt.

When I first started reexamining Madison’s adoption, it was very scary. It was a lot of long conversations with Brett and sleepless nights. It meant confronting things I wanted to leave alone and it meant (means) a struggle not to let myself fall selfishly into guilt. I was also worried about talking to Pennie about it. I was afraid to tell her any of it because I was afraid she’d be angry. At the same time I felt like there were things I needed to say to relieve some of HER burden. (Again, can’t get into too many details here and I apologize for that because I don’t know how much sense this will make.)

See, as I was thinking critically about the adoption industry and more critically about my experience in it, of course I was thinking about Pennie’s experience. Now I’m not going to define her experience but it’s pretty easy to point to X and say, “That was not OK” but then I wondered, should I tell Pennie that I thought it wasn’t OK? Should I not?

There were a lot of reasons not to like:

She didn’t ask me. If she didn’t ask, did I have to answer?
She has different opinions than I do about lots of stuff including adoption. Couldn’t I just hide behind her more positive opinions?
She might get mad about adoption and then get mad at ME.

That third one, that was the one that really got in my way because I could answer the other two. The first one? Yeah, maybe. I mean, it’s one thing to foist an unwelcome point of view on someone and it’s another thing to be a part of conversation and not hold back because of #2 or #3. And second? Pennie and I have discussions about a lot of things, including politics and moral values. Sometimes we agree and sometimes we don’t but I’m always honest with her. Also there’s a difference between being bombastic and having a dialogue.

So were three (maybe lame) reasons I should not to talk to Pennie about it and one really good reason I should: Pennie was beating herself up.

I remember when I was a slutty little teenager but I wanted to believe that I was an empowered young woman. I thought sex was power (thank you, Madonna!) and that to be sexy and to do sex was to be powerful and exercise my power. Actually I was a hungry sad small thing desperate for love and acceptance and willing to trade on my body to get it. For awhile I held onto the idea that I was empowered but that didn’t allow me to grow and move past this image of myself as a slutty little teenager. It also meant that I continued to be slutty even though this made me sad. (I met Brett when I was twenty and I’d been in therapy for awhile then — I remember my therapist brought me a cupcake for my 20th birthday so I was re-examining my slutty teenage ways while I was still barely a teen.) I had to think critically before I could change my image of myself and that was painful but freeing. Does that make sense? I didn’t want to admit that I’d been HAD by the patriarchy but I also wanted to stop sleeping around, which meant I had to be honest with myself about it. If it was so FUN to be slutty, why was I so sad? But if I admitted that it wasn’t working for me, then suddenly all those boyfriends kinda lost their glamorous sheen. (Eventually with therapy I was able to see that nothing is all this or all that and that I could own my history and my experiences without shame but also allow myself to grow past them and into something better.)

I have no desire to define Pennie’s adoption experience, ok? I said that and I mean that. But I do desire that Pennie know that she is one rocking woman and a fabulous mother and a survivor (not a victim) of her circumstances (just like my own formerly slutty little self). I also want her to know that regardless of how she feels about her surrender of Madison and my adoption of Madison that there are still things that were wrong. Even if she feels that placing Madison with us was an awesome decision worthy of zillions of high fives, there are parts of the process that were not good to her. That’s just true.

We didn’t talk about it for a long time but every time we had an adoption discussion, I’d get squirmy. I’d want to change the subject to something more general (adoption generalities, please! Cut the specifics, thanks!) but I felt like I was lying because I was not interrupting Pennie’s willing assumption that any pain she got was just what she deserved.

So eventually we talked about it. I don’t remember what I said (it’s an ongoing discussion anyway) but I do remember the first time I said something that I felt light-headed and that I was probably talking too fast. I usually clean my kitchen or do laundry or other fidgety things when I’m on the phone so I remember pacing in the kitchen with a wet sponge on my hand and at one point looking outside the kitchen window at the roof of our garage with the tree branches waving over it and crying. And I do remember the end of our conversation, which was loving and warm and full of “I love you, too.”

Wait, I’m thinking back and I do remember one thing I said. I do remember I said, “But would you want Madison treated like that? Because I don’t. And I wish you hadn’t been either.” Because whatever self-hatred we mothers struggle with lord knows that we want better for our daughters.

I didn’t want to share that. I didn’t want to share my complicity with Pennie. I wanted to leave well enough alone and let her work through it however she needed to and hold very still and hope that somehow I would avoid her critical gaze but that would have been fundamentally dishonest. Pennie was all too willing to shoulder any blame she might uncover and that isn’t fair.

One day I told her that eventually she might be angry with me and that I’d understand if she was and I’d love her anyway and never ever ever punish her by withholding Madison and she laughed and said, “Oh I love you, Dawn.” She is a better woman than I am, I’ll tell you that now.

She’s in Mexico right now visiting Tommy’s family with Roscoe and I miss her.

I have not always been honest

The Story of My Life 7 Responses »

Apr 162009

I’m pretty sure this is the last of these posts for now.

I’ve not always been honest with myself about Joaquin. It took me a long time to get over him — well, not him so much as the relationship. I get into these funks where I’m thinking on it hard (I’m in one now, obviously) and I used to think it was about him but now I know it’s me trying to figure out me. Why did I love him? Why couldn’t I stay away? What part of me was hurting then and is it still present now? And this time around I’m also wondering, how was I complicit?

In one version of the story of our relationsip’s demise (this is the version I worked over for years), Joaquin throws me over several times. First with someone who went to high school with us, then with a woman with my exact same first name thereby obliterating me. (Even now I occasionally meet someone who can’t quite place me and then it ends up they have me mixed up with her.) In this version of events, I am the victim. Sure, I’m jealous and clingy but he’s the one ripping me apart into teensie-weenie little pieces and then using my attachment (addiction) to him to keep me in his back pocket as a just-in-case. This is all true.

But the other version of the story is also true and it’s one I hadn’t thought on much that has to do with my culpability. So I was thinking about how he used to say that I loved him but I didn’t like him and thinking about how it took me a few years (full of slammed locker doors, hysterical phone calls on either side and heady reunions) to realize he was right. I thought then that he probably didn’t care but maybe he did. It’s probably not a whole lot of fun to realize your girlfriend doesn’t like you all that much.

I disapproved of a lot of his choices and I disagreed with a lot of his values but I was so insecure and so defensive that I couldn’t own this and instead I would try to tear him down the same way he tried to tear me down. Because I saw him as invincible, I never thought that I could really hurt him even though I wanted him to hurt because he hurt me. But while I’m the type of gal whose feelings get hurt if the wind blows too hard, Joaquin was made of tougher stuff and so I had to work a lot harder and I could get pretty freakin’ mean. I’ve forgiven him for being a jerk but (I realize as I type this) I need to forgive myself for my own jerkiness so that I won’t be so desperate to pretend it was all on him.

(There was a lot of unkindness in me during the five years between 15 and 20; I took all of my essential hurt and tried to spread it around.)

I tried to control him as much as he tried to control me (again, with far less success since he had oodles more self-confidence than I did). I remember once in particular that I tried to get him to quit his band and focus more on his painting and I couched it in concern about his art but the truth was I was just tired of his groupies. I mean, if you really love someone you don’t try to make them give up something that they love.

I don’t really know when we stopped loving each other but I always think that if I’d just gotten over it when he dumped me for the girl in our class, we could have remained fond of each other. But I couldn’t let him go. And I guess he couldn’t let me go because he didn’t for a long time.

I used to feel invisible with him but what did I want him to do to prove that he saw me? I felt hemmed in by my girlhood — it was certainly easier for him to be a boy in a band than it was for me to be a girl who wrote poetry — but that wasn’t his fault. I was jealous of his autonomy and the room the world gave him to step out of bounds. I’d get mad when he’d declaim on feminism and ignore what I was going through right in front of him. I had sex with him and it freed him; I guess I can’t really hold him responsible for not seeing how it locked me down. He was 16! Then 17! (The last time we slept together I want to say that I was 19 and he was 21 but honestly I’m just not sure.) We were young and dumb and locked in a pattern that wasn’t kind to either of us.

If we’d just let each other go earlier! If only we hadn’t raked each other over hot coals and trampled over any good feelings we might have had for each other!

THAT is my big Joaquin regret — that I wouldn’t let it go and instead helped throttle my first love into a wilted broken thing.

Ahh well. Youth. Ignorance.

(sigh)

And this really is the last of these posts for now. (I got off subject anyway.)

15 probably is too young but...

Feminism/Politics, The Story of My Life 18 Responses »

Apr 152009

Bj said:

I do think that 15 and in high school is too young (though I’d probably feel differently about 15 and away in college).

And here’s the thing — technically I think 15 is too young, too. Only when I was 15, I sure didn’t feel too young even though I read The Hurried Child while I was babysitting and knew all the arguments.

I loved Joaquin and Joaquin, at that time, was not such a bad boyfriend. It was a loving, respectful relationship at that point and he took my lead when it came to how far I wanted to go. We were having a lot of fun, too, and my first sexual experiences were oodles better than many of my friends who waited. What wasn’t great was the fall-out AFTER.

Part of it was our age; we were too immature to handle the intensity of our feelings and didn’t know what to do with them so we hurt each other. Then again, I know thirty-somethings who are too immature to handle the intensity of their feelings. And there were other things playing into that intensity including the fact that we were both struggling with splintered families and school frustrations and a lot of other things that made our relationship that much more important and that much harder to handle. So I don’t think our age helped but there were other things that played into all of it.

A bigger part of it for me (I don’t know how it was for him since we haven’t talked about it since we reached adulthood) was that there seemed to be a clear delineation between Virgin and Not Virgin. Once I was a Not Virgin I was, essentially, ruined. I mean, as far as the world went. You know, Madonna or Whore. As far as I could tell, there was no in-between place for me to land while I figured things out for myself. I didn’t know how to slow things down in future relationships. I didn’t really know how to think of myself especially since I was the one who pushed our relationship sexually (Joaquin was enthusiastic but never pushy despite being two years older).

I could’ve used some support in the aftermath. I didn’t realize that having sex once didn’t mean I had to have it again with that partner or anyone else.

I also wish that Joaquin and I had been able to grow apart instead of being so dependent on each other that our relationship was a constant series of painful wrenches and insecurities. This had less to do with us having sex than it did with the rest of our lives, which were patently unhappy. (At least on my side, I didn’t have anything else worth living for — this was all going on during the worst of my unhappy school experiences. I’m sure my despserate need for him didn’t endear me to Joaquin all that much.)

So I think the sex thing, for me, gets mixed up with all this other stuff some of which has to do with being young and some of which doesn’t. Which is to say that I think back to those early days with Joaquin with fondness and without regrets but I wish I’d had some help with the rest of it. And I think likely if the rest of my life had been less scrambled that I might not have had sex quite so early and that if I had, it might not have had the fall-out that it had. In other words, I don’t think it was the having of the sex so much as it was everything else, which is why I have mixed feelings about it.

I don’t necessarily want my kids to have sex that young but I won’t kill myself (or them) if it happens either.

But I’ve been looking at the old pics of Joaquin more fondly than in years past; I’m not sure why. I think I’m able to separate the boyfriend he started out being from the numbnuts he eventually became. And I hope he can look back at the girl he first fell in love with and see her separately from the enraged jealous harpy that *I* became. (I am tempted to email him but that never goes well so probably I’ll skip it!!!)