I wanted to be anywhere else other than there. Sitting in my glittery dress and circus ring conductor tailcoat with my peacock feather fascinator. I mean I looked fabulous and appropriate to the occasion. There was even a pirate couple, properly bustiered and feather-hatted. I fit right in.
I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I was huddled forward, my shoulders caved in over my stomach. Couldn’t sit up straight or follow the train of conversation. Couldn’t keep from looking around, I have to believe I looked just a little panicked. I was sitting next to S, a former coworker who I adore, and several times had to nod politely and say “mmm hmmm” or ask him to repeat what he’d just said. I was out of sorts.
I’m usually fine at weddings. I even enjoy them. Glimpses into someone’s intimate life, family and extended friend reality. Lots of quirks and character and choices you’d never necessarily make for yourself. Usually able to let everyone live/let-live and do their thing.
But they showed up late to the ceremony, we were already seated, two empty chairs at our table. They were nice enough to wait until the ceremony finished to be seated, adding a chair and place setting for their ridiculously cute looking son. I wondered which lesbian of the two had carried him. He looked so much like either one. Their hands were all over each other, the women. Weddings are loving occasions. I know it sparks contact.
He was like no young man I’d seen with his family. A bit TOO focused on them. Matching pants to one of their sport coats. And lots of physical contact and touching between the 3 of them. Ok, a physically affectionate family. I thought. But then the contact started to extend, to linger. The hands creep a little too low. It’s like they’d been making out and were about to head back in, the wedding just a pleasant food and drink diversion. At first just between the women, but then clearly toward the son as well.
S had to clear things up. “Oh I read them as a thrupple.” was his response when I mentioned the inappropriate contact between mothers and son. And that should have explained it. Live and let live. You do you. Do your thang. I should have laughed and had it be over, part of a Dan Savage podcast.
But I continued to feel horribly awkward, it really got under my skin. Ruined the event for me, I had a terrible time. It should have been really my element: colorful, eclectic and fun.
“I could use more contact right now.” was B’s response when I mentioned it in the car on the way home. Though both of our first instinct is that we can barely manage just one partner, let alone two. Is it so hard to believe that 3 people could make a commitment? I mean I guess I knew that K and N were poly, but I guess I’d also assumed they’d given that up and chosen marriage. That K had been confused. Yes, I recognize that mistaken logic. I’m discriminating against poly as an individual choice for life and love. I get that. It’s glaringly obvious in my thought processes.
So now I am that middle-aged older person who simply just doesn’t understand the choices of one of the generations after me. We’re simply too different. What I can do, at least in the immediate, is live and let live. What I can’t do is find a way in my heart and brain to make room for the emotional landscapes of multiple people in the deeply intimate context of a relationship.
Both mothers of groom and bride mentioned loving and cherishing their relationship with their child, supporting them through their non-traditional choices. His family looked a bit more traditional. K’s mom made the best wedding toast I’d heard in some time: She’d been asked to impart wisdom from her 40 years of marriage. From her parents 60 years. And hers was the best: “This thing that you’re doing now” she said, watching as K and N gazed into each other’s eyes and canoodled and flirted, “keep doing it. Do it as long as you can. And remember how to do it. Because, and I hate to be the bearer of bad news on a happy occasion, but you’ll need to remember how to do it. Because you will hurt each other. You will be annoyed by each other, and call each other names. You will get into arguments in public, you will feel awful about the state of your relationship. You will apologize later and have incredible make-up sex. You will have children who you will raise together and they will wreck your marriage. And they will leave the house, and you’ll need to be able to find this place again. and again. and again. So do this, as long as you can. And you’ll know some people who will get divorced, and at the risk of being glib, and not to offend anyone for whom it was really the only viable option, but you’ll see divorce. Don’t get one. Just keep finding each other.”
I laughed out loud at the mention of children. It’s the first time I’ve heard anyone openly acknowledge how terribly hard this is. I don’t feel sexy. I’m fat and huge and lazy and exhausted. There was a time I’d have wished to hold onto both my husband and the person I was also madly in love and lust with. I think I convinced myself there’d be a way to make it work. But that time is totally and completely not now.
I don’t feel artistic, or original, or eclectic. I feel deflated and beaten. Tired and old. I feel non-dynamic and colorless, lifeless and uncreative. I feel lower than I’ve felt perhaps ever. and I’m trying to raise a little human while feeling this way. and give her confidence and inspiration and want her to have her own centered, whole, self, with all the choices open to her.
And there it is. That is it. As with any discrimination, it comes down to me. Something that I cannot do, that I cannot fix, that is wrong in my life. A deeply rooted feeling of jealousy and dissatisfaction.
I started to cry, to well up and my center freeze, after B told me he could use more physical affection. We were on MLK, it was misting and the pavement was sparkly. As we passed a road entering to the left a large, grey owl caught my eye. Sitting on the sidewalk, just at the bend in the curb. “Holy shit! Turn, you have to take the next turn and circle back around!” I assumed he was injured and made B loop around the block. To my relief, the owl was gone when we got back there. He must have been fine, perhaps he was after a mouse or squirrel. I think, after looking it up, it was a Great Grey Owl.
Or perhaps I really, really did not want to talk about that intimacy that B so desperately needs.