Ruminating on life with/without Brett
Nov 8, 2007 The Story of My Life
Because I miss my handsome, dimpled cohort, I’ve been thinking about the many ways I tried to sabotage our relationship at the beginning. Like periodically breaking up with him (the first time I broke up with him was because I took him to a comedy club and he laughed and I felt laughing at comedy clubs was terribly un-punk rock), and calling ex-boyfriends all the time. Every time we’d take a step to towards more commitment (after we moved in together, after he proposed, just before we moved to Portland) I’d call up an ex-boyfriend and complain about Brett. It was a lousy thing to do but I was terrified. (And because I’m a loud-mouth, I always ended up telling Brett who somehow survived all that without being jealous. I think he knew me better than I knew myself.)
Then, right after we got married, I got a crush on a guy I worked with who was a complete and utter jerk, which is the type of guy I generally fell for pre-Brett.
It scared me to think of being happy and to think of being caught in happiness.
The boy I was dating just before Brett was sort of custom-made for a girl afraid of happiness. Not that we were really dating — it was more about sex. This guy was a mess and none too nice (not mean either, really, just too screwed up to really be boyfriend material). He had a little face like a cat and he made my knees go weak. He disapproved of Brett — who had his own baggage — but when I said, “Listen, do you think you could ever love me? Because I think this guy could.” He admitted that he didn’t know if we had any kind of future, which wasn’t the same as giving his blessing but at least he could see my point.
I watch my little sisters and Jessica working out their own relationship stuff and it brings it all back; it’s so hard. It’s hard even if you find the perfect partner (because nobody’s perfect). I watch them make some of the same mistakes I did and I watch them make better choices than I ever could. I feel lucky that all my sabotage efforts went for naught. (And I am forever grateful for ex-boyfriend E who refused to meet me in-person to say good-bye before we moved to Portland because he sensed I was vulnerable. E always was a gentleman. Sorta. Anyway he was nice, which was why I dumped him.)
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Tags: boyfriend, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, Portland, working out
How to feel old
Jun 28, 2006 The Story of My Life
1. Go to myspace because an evil friend sent you the link to a mutual friend.
2. Get a pseudo-membership so you can access blogs and pictures.
3. Begin to see stalking possibilities and commence stalking.
4. Locate ex-boyfriends: no surprises.
5. Locate ex-friends: no surprises.
6. Look up children you used to babysit for and see they are all in college and apparently have full-grown faces and bodies.
7. Say out loud to the screen, “Why, I used to wipe your tushie and now look at you trolling for dates on the internet! And such language! Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”
8. Turn off computer sound because the stuff the kids these days are listening to just sounds like so much noise.
I. Am. So. Old.
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Tags: boyfriend, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, myspace, stalking
Nightmares must be catching
Feb 12, 2006 The Story of My Life
I had bad dreams last night and so did Noah. His were from watching the leech scene in A Series of Unfortunate Events. I’m not sure what mine were about.
Two ex-boyfriends showed up in them. One of them I know. I mean I know what he is symbolically because he’s a writer and when he arrives in a dream, I know the dream is about writing. Usually about my insecurity about my writing. So that explains him away. The other one, I’m less sure about.
He’s the one I’ve written about before and I don’t know why he won’t stay out of my dreams.
In this one he decided to drop by for a visit and I was racing around this big old house (probably inspired by the same movie that sent Noah off to dream-land) trying to find a room with a lock. I didn’t want him to know I was home because I knew if he found that out, he’d stay until I had to come out and see him. I peeked through a window as he pulled away in his truck and he glanced up and saw me and grinned.
What’s that all about?
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Tags: boyfriend, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, Noah
Defending people who don’t like me
Dec 28, 2005 Adoption
I figured this blogger must have found either some anti-adoption sites or some blogs written by women who are anti-adoption. I don’t know because she’s not linking to them (she doesn’t want to give them traffic) but I will link to her so you’ll know what I’m talking about.
In her blog entry Deanna decries birth mothers who “feel they have full right to go invade someone’s privacy and worse to disturb the lives of the children they claim they love. Some of these woman are disturbing the lives of minor children that they placed 12 to 17 years ago.”
I went and looked through the blogs listed on Aimee’s ring and I think I found at least one of the ones she’s talking about: Musings of the Lame.
You know, I pitched my antiadoption article to two places and both of them said that they felt that antiadoption sentiment was so uncommon and weird that they didn’t see the point of an article on it. Further they said the same thing Deanna said — they didn’t want to give “those people” a voice. This frustrates me. “Those people” have some legitimate gripes whether or not I agree with their modes, methods or whole-hearted hatred of all things adoption. But as someone interested in adoption reform and as someone who has hung out in enough adoption forums to know that the adoptive industry can be pretty twisted in their treatment, exploitation, and prejudices against women making an adoption plan, I can see where they’re coming from. And frankly, plenty of adoptive parents are just … gross in the way they talk about their children’s birth parents. Hang on the adoption.com forums and you’ll see. Do a search on “she changed her mind” and watch people revile women who do nothing worse than parent their own children.
Now obviously I’m not antiadoption and I’m not spending my time trying to give Madison back to her natural mother but I’m also not going to point my finger at a woman who thinks I ought to do that and call her crazy. For one, what she thinks I ought to do has no impact on my life. It doesn’t have to hurt me. No matter how civil we might be to each other (and during my interviews I did not speak to one antiadoption activists who was not civil to me), we’re going to fundamentally disagree about the choices I’ve made. So be it.
Deanna says in her entry, (which also slams interracial and interfaith couples — I’m just sayin’) that clearly women who are angry enough to aggressively pursue reunion with their bio kids are too selfish to be mothers. Now this is a common claim about antiadoption activists — that they’re too crazy to raise their own kids anyway so good riddance. I think that when people do this they’re just running from the fact that crazy or not, what many of the activists have to say about adoption in this country holds a lot of water. Coercion really is alive and well in the adoption industry. And even those who were not coerced but now have deep regrets, imagine if you lost your child — just imagine! — maybe it might make you a little nuts on the subject, too.
I’m not saying that every antiadoption activists is right and ought to have her child back or absolute free access to her child or that I’m not thankful that J isn’t an antiadoption activists (I think having an open adoption with an antiadoption activists would call for professional mediation), I’m just saying that people have a right to their feelings and they have a right to put their energy into a cause that is important to them.
As to invading the privacy of the child who was placed for adoption, I only found the one blog. In that one her 18-year old (then 16-year old) son in a decision made by his adoptive parents was denied the right to hear that she was looking for him. I don’t know these adoptive parents and I can’t say whether or not they made the right decision. I don’t know where he was about his adoption or what challenges he had that year or what but that does seem odd to me, too. And I reckon I’d be pretty angry and frustrated if I was his birth mom and got that close but then couldn’t bridge that small gap. Now as an adoptive parent, I don’t know if I actually feel horrified by her actions. I mean, heck, I’m someone who periodically googles ex-boyfriends, right? And they don’t have nearly the emotional tie for me that I’d have with a child I placed for adoption. How could she NOT google him? That would be way more self-control than I’d have.
But here’s a lesson to us adoptive parents — if we have a closed adoption we still will not necessarily be able to control what happens with our children’s birth family. Further, what happens around our child and his or her birth family will ultimately have very little to do with us. We can’t keep our children in boxes. They will have web pages and they will maybe be in the newspaper and they will go out and live their lives and so even if we want to “protect” them from their birth families, we may not be able to do this. We can, however, facilitate a relationship early on. We can have some measure of openness, we can have contact through an agency if we’re not comfortable with more. We can keep sending pictures and letters to our adoption professionals even if the birth parents stopped picking them up years ago because one day that might change. We can open that door ourselves so that if and when the time comes for some sort of reunion, we will have oriented ourselves to be ready for it.
I don’t think that adoptive parents have any obligation to read antiadoption sites although I think that reading about the grim side of adoption can help us be more upright in our own dealings. You can always just read some adoption reform sites to get a feel for what’s happening among reform activists. I think that’s a good thing to do, really, because I think that we might think one way about adoption but we ought to prepare ourselves for our children to grow up and feel differently. Truthfully I have no idea (and no control over) whether or not Madison will join the Transracial Abductee contingent or if she’ll grow up and create a foundation to promote adoption.
I have more to say but Madison needs rocking.
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Tags: adoption reform, boyfriend, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, Madison, open adoption
Music is an opiate
Feb 3, 2005 The Story of My Life
Do you remember in high school when hearing the right song at the right time could save your life? When writing song lyrics on your Social Studies folder gave you enough strength to walk to the next class, right past your ex-boyfriend’s locker the day after he dumped you? When the best way to run away from home was to sit in a dark room with your headphones on?
Yeah, me too.
Tenth grade was Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
Eleventh grade was Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration (I saw that tour).
The year right after high school was The Smith’s The Queen is Dead.
I was thinking about this because “How Soon is Now” came on the radio while we were driving home from Noah’s Spanish class.
I thought about the way we all used to dive onto the dance floor when the first curving part of the song blasted out the club speakers. I used to have a long, black satin duster from the 50s that was the envy of every other goth-wannabe. We all had long, long bangs and hung our heads sideways not just to look sorry and sad but because it’s the only way we could see past our hair. Every single one of us just knew Morrissey was singing our story, peering right into each individual heart.
I was singing it to J the other day while I drove her home, “So you go and you stand on your own/and you leave on your own/and you go home and you cry and you want to die.”
It made her laugh but she knew what I was talking about. That Morrissey. He tells it like it is.
In high school I really did cover all of my notebooks with lyrics. I wrote them as teensy-tiny as possible — both sides of both records of The Wall, done entirely by heart. Somehow I figured that lyrics like “There is no pain, you are receding/A distant ship smoke on the horizon/You are only coming through in waves/Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying” would protect me from the godawful pain of being fourteen. My folders were the marvel of my classmates and by putting the lyrics there in my own bad handwriting, it was like I owned them and that would somehow make me stronger.
We used music like a drug, the whole group of purposeful outcasts that made up my chosen companions. My friend Sarah and I would grab her father’s luxury caddie and race it up and down hills in rural Ohio blasting “Trilogy” by Emerson Lake and Palmer or on more mellow days, “Song to the Siren” by This Mortal Coil. I taped my boyfriend’s voice, like a talisman, on the end of my copy of Pink Floyd’s Animals so I could hear him at the very end, a comfort in the dark coming through my headphones. I would fall asleep and startle awake to him whispering in my ear, “This is great, listen to this…”
I drove down High Street the other day, down the main drag where we used to wander with our hair teased up with Aqua Net hairspray (in the purple can for super-hold) wearing lace-up pointy-toed boots and torn fishnets. I saw this young man — a boy, really — who looked like a mass of insecure bravado, all punk rock tattoos and tasteful bedhead. It was a weirdly warm January day and so he was walking in his shirt sleeves and some band logo was proudly displayed on his chest. And I thought you know, he’s doing what we used to do, trying to convey some part of himself through this t-shirt, as if the band could stand in for every little bit of who he wants to be or wishes that he was.
I was stopped at a light when he stepped into the street right in front of me and I wished I knew then what I know now — that those band t-shirts were a sign of our vulnerability. Instead I totally bought the hype and if that boy had crossed my path at 17, I would have thought he was deep and introspective instead of someone really hoping I would think he was deep and introspective.
It would have saved me a lot of heartache if I had known that about those boys. Then again, at least I had the right soundtrack to see me through.
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Tags: boyfriend, ex-boyfriends, high school, Music, Noah