by Band Back Together | Nov 3, 2010 | Bullying, Childhood Bullying, Coping With Bullying, Gay Is Okay, Gender Nonconformity, How To Heal From Being Bullied, Teen Bullying, Transgender |
This post originally appeared on my blog on October 17, 2010
A while back, I was Facebook-friended by someone with whom I’d gone to elementary school, a woman I hadn’t seen in 15 years. In that same week, I was friended by another schoolmate, a man I hadn’t seen in 25 years. I’ll call these two people, who are not Facebook friends with each other, Leia and Mork.
I was happy to be back in touch with Leia and Mork. Leia and I, and Mork and I, in separate sets of messages, chatted in the way that long-lost friends do, telling each other where we live, how many kids we have, what we do for work. We exchanged several messages. A few messages in, both Mork and Leia asked me what sort of writing I did. And so I told them, as simply as I could: I write, under a pen name, about my son, who likes to wear a dress.
And you know what? Both Leia and Mork never wrote back.
Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe the conversations just dropped off in the way conversations eventually do, and it just happened to be after I dropped the pink-bomb on each of them. Maybe they both got busy, sick, or their computers went on the fritz.
Or maybe they got freaked out.
Because people sometimes do.
I notice that the tomboy in Sam’s grade who plays on the boys’ soccer team is cool and socially in demand, while Sam doesn’t get invited to many birthday parties. Sometimes people look at us strangely when we disclose that Sam, the long-haired kid they’ve taken for a girl, is a boy. Sam’s school administration can talk eloquently about diversity and acceptance up and down, except when it comes to gender, when they get all panicky and quiet.
I make it my business to talk to as many people as I can about Sam (while being careful of his privacy and his safety), to make gender nonconformity something that gets talked about, not something swept under the rug. Because when we hide something, we make it shameful. So I open my mouth, maybe even more than I should, and occasionally I lose an audience member or two, like Leia and Mork.
But maybe the next time they hear about someone’s son who wears a dress, they’ll remember that the woman they kind of liked back in elementary school mentioned something about her son wearing a dress, and maybe that will make it a little bit more OK.
by Band Back Together | Nov 3, 2010 | Adoption, Estrangement, Healing From A Rape or Sexual Asault, Rape/Sexual Assault, Trauma |
A 30-year family secret is no longer a secret. My sister was the victim of a violent rape, the perpetrator never known or charged. She hid her pregnancy, and the rape, for seven months. When the family found out we all rallied around her, but the decision was hers to give the baby up for adoption.
After the trauma of rape, birth and recovery, that was that. It was never spoken of again. Until last month when my sister tells us she’s been in touch with her birth daughter. We are all delighted to welcome this new niece, cousin, and granddaughter into our lives, but my sister is not so sure. The re-discovery of her daughter has brought back 30 years of repressed memories of the rape. The daughter can’t wait to meet her birth mother (she initiated the contact), but my sister can’t separate the daughter from the rape. I understand, and respect my sister’s decision to never meet her birth daughter.
I have friends and even a cousin who re-discovered their birth families after 20 or more years, and all their stories have happy endings.
But none of them sprung from a rape.
This is all made more difficult by the fact that the girl grew up just a few counties away, and her two families (birth and adoptive) have crossed paths before, albeit unknowingly.
Given the circumstances, it would have been best for my sister to never have found her daughter. But it’s too late to unlearn the truth, and we’re left wondering where to go from here.
There are many resources out there for birth parents reuniting with long-lost children, but I can’t find anything that deals with women who were victims of rape reuniting with their adopted children.
If anyone out there has a similar story to share, my sister could really use the support.
by Band Back Together | Nov 3, 2010 | Infidelity, Marriage and Partnership, Marriage Problems |
t seems like my heart and soul are always wandering. In my life I have always had guy friends. And it was always OK, except when it went too far 2 years ago.
I had become friends with a guy on Facebook, let’s call him Henry. We had some friends in common but I’d never met him in person. Henry was a blogger, and a very good one at that. I would read his blog and comment on his FB status daily. We flirted back and forth. His FB relationship status was “single” while mine was “married.” I quickly liked him.
We began chatting on FB. We would chat for hours at night. After the third night of this, my hubby noticed and got really pissed. He finally confronted me. I ‘fessed up that I had developed feelings for Henry. We began marriage counseling.
I recognized why I had strayed and was determined that it would never happen again. But in the time since this happened, I realized that I need that male presence in my life. I like to flirt.
So now I am friends with guys that are “safe.” These are guys that my husband knows or is friends with. These are guys that I don’t see alone. I don’t know what would happen if I did. Could I control myself?
I had once thought of myself as a butterfly, flitting from person to person, never finding a home. But I know where my home is, and I always come back to it.
I just hope I don’t get carried away by the wind again.
by Band Back Together | Nov 2, 2010 | Anger, Coping With Divorce, Divorce, Help With Relationships, Loneliness, Romantic Relationships, Single Parenting |
The life of a single mother is not all that glamorous. Sometimes I act like it is. Life is just great being alone and raising 3 kids.
Truth be told, it is hard! I don’t have someone to sit down with at night and talk to about problems I am having with the kids. I don’t have someone who is raising them right alongside of me, someone who knows everything I do. It is a very lonely life.
Pretty much I have been single for the last 2 years. There have been a few small relationships, though. I have watched my friends find men that love them unconditionally. I have watched them be happy and in love. I go to dinner or go to hang out and all of a sudden I am the odd one out. I am the fifth wheel. Bonfires where everyone is cuddling close to their significant other, I am sitting alone trying to keep warm and keep from crying all the lonely tears that are bottled inside of me.
I was hurt really bad. It did more damage than even I like to admit. I know I have faults, and I even know what they are. But I just don’t see a point in trying to fix them if I continually get judged based on them. I am a lot better than before. My faults aren’t nearly as large.
When someone loves you…aren’t they supposed to love you unconditionally? Despite your faults? Aren’t they supposed to help you to better yourself and not judge you and leave you? That can’t be true love can it?
I want someone to stand beside me. I want someone to love me for me. I am a good person. I am a good mother. I am a good friend. I am kind. I am caring. I am loving and trusting and trustworthy.
Can one trivial thing ruin that in every single relationship I try to make work? Is it really that bad? Is being unorganized, and maybe a little chaotic and messy really a reason to stop loving someone? I don’t think so but I guess I am wrong because I have lost the one thing I want most in this life because of it. And in trying to find it again I get told the same thing over and over.
by Band Back Together | Nov 1, 2010 | Anxiety, Cirrhosis, Hepatitis, Liver Disease, Stress, Trauma |
The day I got the phone call, I felt the wholeness of my little world, my security, bodily health, relationship, and peace of mind break apart, red hot, and scatter in every direction around me. That phone call was an atom bomb. My life blew to pieces and then rained down all about me. Everything burned.
Three words changed my life: “you tested positive.”
The blood ran from my face into my feet as I hung up the phone. Although my eyes were open, in a spell of synesthesia, I saw nothing but the sound of the blood beating at my temples. I was delivered my test results in a department store, without my shoes on, and in jeans that weren’t even my own. My skin grew cold and foreign.
I don’t remember peeling the denim from my legs, pulling my coat around my body, or stumbling into the November air of the parking lot. Minutes tick by and I have no recollection of their existence. In the following weeks, I find that whole chucks of my life go missing. I am thankful for those disappeared hours… the sound of my own keening and wailing, all animal, would have later haunted my dreams.
I sat in the car as the sobs ripped through me and left no part of my body untouched. They pulsed through my fingertips, clung to my ribs, drew my thighs toward my chest. They puffed into little clouds of steam in the cold, dispersed, and were replaced by more tiny clouds. I cried all the way home, bent double, called my lover, begged forgiveness. He talked me down. Said I had nothing to be sorry for. He went on with life as usual and by doing so, pulled me through all of my darkest days.
I owe him everything.
You would think that I’d have more to say about the details of this day, but it’s grown flat. I remember the back drop of grey clouds and little else.
I wavered between periods of eerie silence that sounded almost like peace and inconsolable mourning. One moment I was calm, while in the next I swore I could feel the tiny, organic machines sliding through my blood, dismembering my liver. During those first weeks, I read all I could about viruses in fascinated horror. In this, I found a strange comfort.
I lived through the nightmare of half a dozen doctors visits, a battery of tests, and waiting for more phone calls that once hung up leave me sobbing into my shaking hands. My bilirubin was so high, I was only a hairsbreadth away from jaundice, a second antibody test came back positive.
My heart pounded as I read domestic magazines in waiting rooms. The insides of my elbows turned the color of plums with bruises that bloom in the wake of one blood draw after another. I dropped ten pounds in a few weeks. The nurses looked at me with chiding eyes and said, “you really need to eat, you know. You can’t lose any more weight.”
But food turned to sand in my mouth. I had been hollowed out and couldn’t seem to fill myself again.
During all this, my one respite was sleep… plagued night after night by nightmares all my life, the dreams I had at that point were more beautiful than any I had ever assumed possible. My sleeping mind drew images in the dark that blotted out my suffering: my beloved dead showed up, smiling; an evening was lit up bright as day with my mind’s fireworks; a door set into the floorboards swung open to blue sky.
My dreams provided me with a much needed unremembereing. Waking up was the hard part; the sweet flesh of night gave way to the hard light of morning. Really, the relearning of your life as you wake up is the hardest part of this disease, next to liver failure.
This is not to say that there is no hope.
Treatment is long and brutal, similar in its side effects to chemo, but at a success rate of 50%, worth the hair loss, headaches, nausea, anemia, and sleeplessness for the chance to have my health back and a glass of chilled white zinfandel. I did my research and found I was ready to wander 48 weeks in that desert of treatment at the chance of being delivered from my suffering.
It was then I decided that I wasn’t going to mourn any more, I was only going to fight.
