Compassion

It's warm and summery, and I am getting over a virus (not swine flu, thankfully) and severe back spasms. A hot rock massage and heavy duty Rx muscle relaxants have helped. But I haven't been good for much, dragging myself to appointments and meetings, and fights with G, a short fun visit with M who popped up for a short few days, and work on trying to create a new consulting business for myself, without enough energy or mental focus left to blog, so my apologies, I am sorry.

G is still not fully moved out, I had to pack her socks and underwear and clear out her closet to keep her from coming over every other day for 3 socks at a time. She was also finding a way of still doing her laundry here. Actually she would start a wash and leave for hours ("I'll be right back") expecting me to wash and fold her clothes and pack them neatly for her pick up. Old habits die hard (I admit I was washing, folding, and neatly bagging), and finally she did come back after 9 hours to find her clothes still wet in the washer. We agreed that she would wash and dry her clothes at her own house share. Her new place is quite nice and larger than this tiny house, so I feel less accommodating when she complains about how little space she has (which is why she hasn't moved all her things).

G did have an outburst in the last mediation/therapy session we had, and it became clear to me (with the help of the gay boy therapist) that her anger is ancient and deep and she can't always tell the difference between the present (where she is reasonable and friendly) and the past (where she is traumatized, vicious, angry, miserable, and cruel). In a perhaps inappropriate professional moment, after G stormed out accusing both gay boy and me of calling her crazy, I looked at him in a familiar and utter bewilderment, and he said levelly "It's okay, it's not you." I know I bear a lot of responsibility for what failed in the relationship but it was reassuring to know that some things really are not rooted in what seemed to be the reality I shared with G. I realized that she has, and has had, her out of control moments when we were alone, never when there was a third party (except for this first time with gay boy present), and I have felt bizarrely disoriented, alone, and stressed during many of our most intense interactions. I understand that G's mother treated her with a drunken cruelty, torture, viciousness, abuse, and sneering neglect, but it's a truth I am still unable to imagine in its full scope. And it breaks my heart.

I am learning to dial back, now, not to try to fix something I cannot, and find my own pleasure and joy in the experience of human consistency with M. I hope life sends G the peace and joy she deserves. I won't expect her to be fair to me, or even be in the present with me when we must interact, she'll just do the best she can, and perhaps in the end this all we can ever expect of each other - from each according to our ability, to each according to our need...perhaps everything ends up balancing out, not with each other, but with the universe of human beings we find in the totality of our lives. Perhaps this falls into life's lessons about love, compassion, and acceptance.

To Mend and Heal and Begin Again

And now it is done. And I can breathe. Twas both a sad day to grieve the end of a long relationship and a day of relief; and now starts the healing, the mending, and the beginning of a new life.

I noticed that I have a little bit of fear of the unknown, the risk of the new, the change that I have chosen. I told M that I felt afraid for the first time in a long time, that sense of being alone, apart, on my own. She said, quite gently, "You're not alone, I am here for you." And this is true, and I am grateful that we are there for each other, despite the geographic distance. She is my anchor.

And it is also true that I just changed my first overhead light bulb in decades by myself. I am both embarrassed and proud of myself - I had to carry the six foot ladder up from the basement and unscrew the glass globe. I had a small audience of the dogs and the cat who all seemed quite intrigued by my behavior. I am ready to be a self-sufficient femme, a strong woman who can take care of a house by myself, change furnace filters (yes, it's still cold here, it flurried last night), drain hot water heaters, mow the lawn, use the gas-powered weed whacker, and run the snow blower when I need to.

A femme friend (and previously straight woman) told me to "find a man"; I laughed as she explained that she meant "find a man to hire" to do all the things your butch can't do, or haven't a butch to do. Since this divorce has hit my finances pretty hard, I plan to learn to do all the things I can't afford to hire a man to do, and do my best. I look forward to M coming to visit me in early May and forever, and teaching me a butch thing or two about how to be handy in the home (she is very handy in her own home). This might be a really great thing for me, to learn to be more confident about fixing things and navigating through the running of the physical aspects of homeownership. I want to be more of an equal contributor in the future to the owning and running of a house. I can be a macho girl!

Any advice on good websites or how-to books or things I should be aware of are all gratefully accepted and appreciated.

Wish me luck!

The Salamander's Path

Tonight is the first night of Spring that is rainy and over 40 degrees, and thus the night when salamanders wake from their winter burrows driven by lust to travel great distances to bright vernal pools to fuck.

Thursday night the spring peepers and the wood frogs were out, the cacophony of spring in sudden shouting orgy in the vernal pools in the hills. Joined tonight by the salamanders. All driven by lust, by the need to fuck, to mate, and more importantly, the cause to live.

I know what it feels like. To have lived in hibernation, in stasis, in my own deep burrow, going nowhere for 12 years. And then, suddenly, awake, driven by inexplicable desire to do what seems natural, what seems essential, in order to live. To travel far through the mud and the muck, across uncertain terrain, under the threat of predation, to find that clear spring pool, to find that other creature, also driven inexplicably to that same place, to be the end to each others journey, and mate. To be gloriously alive, together.

M is, however, unhappy with me, tonight. She hates G, who inventively and sneakily tries to find ways to engage me, even negative ways, her own form of continuous low-level torture. I told M that G likes to fight like M likes to fuck. Each has her own language of intimacy. Unfortunately for one, I don't like to fight, and fortunately for the other, I do love to fuck.

But M is frustrated with me because I don't stand up to G in ways that M would. M literally threw her last gf out, changed the locks, and got a court order of protection. But I am not M. Perhaps I am just weaker, perhaps I am full of mistakes, perhaps if righteousness required that I simply and unceremoniously tossed G and her things out I would opt for half-righteousness (a cruel joke in my mind between being assed and half-assed, perhaps) - even as I angrily and desperately want G to stop trying to engage me and wish she would let it go. Perhaps I am not hard enough or strong enough to be abrupt, though G would aver that I have been as bitterly abrupt as ending a 12 year relationship is wont to be. I am clearly a disappointment to G, as I see I am now clearly a disappointment to M as well, in this regard. And now I feel as if I have failed twice.

This is hard, this working out how to create a new relationship that is not tainted by the poison of the last. And perhaps this is that great caveat about not starting a new relationship until the last is dead and gone. But like all things in my life, I apparently need to do things in my own way, driven at times by an inexplicable urging, the desire to follow a path that may not be the shortest or the surest, but is my path. I hope M does not give up on me, but I understand if she does. The world, like this night, is filled with hundreds of thousand of salamanders who have found their way to bright vernal pools, and with hundreds of thousands, lost and broken, who have not.

I Love You, M

I love you, my M. In a few hours you will rise before dawn and call me. And we will get to spend yet another few short hours together, before the start of another day.

I miss waking up beside you, feeling your skin, your fingers drawing lines on my body, the rise and fall of your chest as you fall back asleep, with me in your arms.

I am staying at my ex's S, while she and her wife are traveling to warmer climes. I have not been living at my beloved home for weeks now (terribly dislocating & painful), since G cannot be trusted not to hurt me, in ways large and small and always, sadly, underhandedly. And I am learning to be pissed, pissed without pettiness, but with self-respect, and I am now kicking G out of my brainspace she has desperately been trying to occupy (as in W Bush and the Iraq Occupation) as she seeks revenge on me for refusing to continue the horrible game, and for ending the too deep well of my emotional and financial support of her. I remain surprised that she continues to fight bitterly with me over ending a relationship that was manifest daily most often as bitter and relentless fighting.

Much to M's (and all of my friends' worried relief) I have finally realized that I have to let my blind heart give way to my clear mind when the target of G's (perhaps conscious, perhaps unconscious) manipulations. My mind is my only real defense, because G shrewdly realizes I really don't like to fight, I do prefer kindness and seek harmony (my strong desire to remain friends), and she has cravenly sought to appeal to and exploit these traits in me financially and emotionally while she berates and belittles me, but she mistakes my kindness and generosity for stupidity and weakness, and now I am, finally, pissed.

I had hoped that G and I could be friends (as I remained with S), but I now understand it may not be the case for a very long time, and perhaps this is a good thing for now. I hope G finds happiness, somewhere, sometime, with someone who can love her unconditionally; she deserves a good and loving life, but that is not to be with me.

And now, finally, to sleep, so the next sound I hear will be the phone and M's voice welcoming me to the morning.

Finding My Life

M is coming on Tuesday to fetch me, so we can spend 9 days together at her home in the Midwest. Hopefully she will miss the storm that threatens tonight, a major Nor'easter, with snow totals up to 10 inches here.

I am not at home tonight, I am with two lovely friends who have taken me in, because I could not take more of G's outbursts, and I was becoming too stressed, finding myself upset, confused, or crying after being yelled at, scolded, mocked, or belittled. I understand G has a lot of pain and she feels some comfort at being a victim of something, but I can't feed into it anymore. I also can't expect to find rationality and reason in raw emotion, I have to stop trying to find what may not be there, just accepting it and letting it be, instead. So I am staying with friends until M comes, and will return to housesitting two other friends' home when I get back. Hopefully G and I can agree to an exit date certain when we meet again tomorrow in therapy with our gay boy. But I am not holding my breath.

Thank you to fimg, pom, diane, and pbd for your thoughtful, supportive and helpful comments on my last post. They were actually very helpful to me, and were instrumental in getting me to this current evolution. I do appreciate your thoughts and insights. This is a hard journey and it's a hard balancing act, and I am trying to find that middle path that honors what was good about my relationship with G, and maintains my self respect and integrity. G has made it a point to let me know she is not going to tell me anything about anything she does or whom she sees (I have not asked), though she regularly asks me probing questions about my life and whereabouts; I realized that it is not unhealthy to keep a separate and private life from each other, and so I will. I may be slow on the draw but I eventually get there (I hope). I also realized the first and hardest task for me is to get G out of my head. I can't keep letting her live and grow in there and then wonder why it feels like my head is going to explode. I need that room now to face both the great potential and the great challenges of the life I have and of the life I want, in a way that is responsible to and respectful of who I am. It's the grown up way, surprising even for a middle aged lesbian like me, who thought I knew what grown up was. Shows you how wonderful being alive is: life remains full of endless surprises, lessons, joys, and blessings.

Status Report

Life has been incredibly complicated and both a bit tortuous and a bit of a relief. As one might suspect, I am in the throes (hopefully not the Dick Cheney version of unending "last throes") of ending the relationship with G. It is going both better and worse than I had hoped, and M remains my beautiful and loving constant.

G and I are now seeing a third party couples counselor to try to amicably end the relationship; as it turns, G became angry and bitter, despite our previous signed agreement to end the relationship in mid-2008 if nothing had changed, and nothing had changed. But it's one thing to get to that level of finality on your own, another to have someone else so declare. She agrees that the relationship was not healthy and that we were not better together than we are as separate individuals, but it is a familiar hell, and sometimes there is a strong draw to the familiar, even as it destroys you.

G has agreed to move out, and I am happy to keep the little tiny house amidst the woods and fields, but I do empathize with the grief and loss she has in leaving it. It is a wonderful, magical little place. My previous ex (S) and M and the gay boy therapist have all been on me not to try to fix things for G, not to try to make it "better" for her, and this is a hard lesson for me. I am a nurturer by nature and it's hard to see someone else in pain, even as she still has her moments where she is mean or cruel to me; I tend to excuse it as reflexive and not as conscious. M tells me what she feels (she wants to drive up and kick G's ass) but leaves it to me to handle. I am grateful for her patience with me in this winding process, perhaps I am wrong or naive to act as if I can expect the best measure of good grace from G, but I still find I cannot give up hope that we can all change for the better. It's what has kept me going as a political activist, and I see no reason to exclude my personal life from my global views. And I have learned many lessons over my life, perhaps this one will be as interesting as all the others.

What remains most difficult in all of this is that I have decided not to declare my relationship with M. This has been a terrible strain and I feel awful on so many fronts about this. I do agree with M that if G feels I am leaving her for another woman that she will entrench and all hope for any reasoned separation will be gone. But I hate it. I hate it because I love M and I want the world to know it. I hate it because it just causes me to try to live a lie and I am a terrible liar. I won't be in the closet about being queer, but I am now in the closet about being in love for the first time in my life. This may be the most bizarre thing that I have ever done, and I have done some pretty out there things in my lifetime. Let's hope it's only this bizarre for a short time more. If anyone has any thoughts on how to deal with this, I would be eternally grateful for your ideas. Simply "kicking G's ass and throwing her out", as an idea, is already taken by M, so you might want to cross that off your list. I tend to favor more amicable approaches. But I am open to just about anything right now.

Thanks for your patience with the spottiness of my posts lately, life is very complicated. I hope I can enjoy simplicity again, soon.

And yes, I am going back to visit M again soon, this time for a week. How I explain this absence to all those here in my New England is just beyond my reach right now, but I expect I will come up with something soon, since I miss my darling M terribly and long for her each day.

Finally

The days are quickly slipping away before I leave Hawai'i. I will miss my mother so very much. She is a dear, sweet, kind human being. Simple in her outlook and expectations of life. She has no ulterior motives and I can't seem to find any guile in her. I hope that someday I will find the kind of presentness that she lives. She is a Buddhist, of course.

My life is in such flux. I spent the last two years believing in Change! Who knew that 2008/2009 would be, as well, a time of great personal change for me. I finally made the decision, in mid-November, to stop trying desperately to save a long dissolving and mutually unhappy 12 year relationship. I decided that upon my return from Hawai'i, I would leave G. About a month later, in a moment of full acceptance, I wrote and posted "Hope" about the loss of hope for the continuation of the relationship. During that month's time of self-reflection and searching to gain more insight into why I failed the relationship, I fully faced that an essential and explicit dynamic (butch/femme top/bottom) was missing from my life and that I could never find relationship happiness or satisfaction without it. One day after I posted "Hope" in mid December, I unexpectedly met M (my younger sizzling butch top), and we both fell instantly, completely, and surprisingly in love, for the very first time in both of our lives.

In a world where orderliness is often the prized value, my life is full of disorder, it's messy. Would I have preferred to have broken completely with G before I ever met and fell in love with M? I believe the correct answer is yes, but the real life answer is, after considering my path, I could never have given up the chance to love M or to accept her love for me, no matter how or when it happened. At 50, I am getting too old to wait for happiness. I never thought for a second that I would finally fall in love at this point in my life. Given my genes, I only have about 50 years left to love her. And I'm not wasting a moment of it.

And Life Continues

Phone sex. Intense phone sex. We had intense phone sex last night and I came hard. After that I, apparently, started babbling about truckers and socks, and I vaguely remember having a dream about M selling white athletic socks out of the cab of her truck but with the disclaimer that sales would only be made to those with valid proof of age ID (over 18 only), and then I passed out.

A version of sleepwalking runs in my family. It's like sleeptalking. It is sleeptalking. My mother does it all the time. We appear to be awake in bed, our eyes are open, and we can sit up, but we are dead asleep. You can carry on a conversation with me, ask me questions and the like, and I will, I am told, answer you but the answers may be a bit peculiar. G finds this both a way to amuse herself and thinks it's some kind of a lie-detector. It is not a particularly accurate indicator, as I suspect that I (like my sleeptalking mother) am truthful to the reality of my dreams. I sometimes wake up in the middle of talking because I hear a voice and it doesn't make any sense and then I realize it's my voice.

I have found that I am unable to lie or lie through omission with M. I can barely keep a good secret from her. I sent her a card recently (well, several cards and flowers) and I called her up to tell her what the card looked like and what I wrote. She just laughed and said I should save my money and just call her with descriptions of the cards and what I would have written. But real cards are better and I can enclose pics of my life in New England.

She likes the pictures of my house and land. It's a small place by my town's standards, less than 15 acres, mostly woods. An acre or two of lawn. A few outbuildings, including a very small barn. And a very tiny house with a large three season porch and a bank of windows. Perfect for two. I hope that I will be able to keep it in the upcoming divorce, it's the first house I have ever purchased and owned, I got the mortgage when I was making a lot of money, before I decided to give it up to try to make a living as a freelance writer. Freelancing is much spottier financially, and I have temp-ed, as well, but I am happier than when I worked 6+ days a week from 8am until 10 or 11 most evenings. There was a two to three year period when I never saw my home by sunlight except for the very early morning before I left for work and my hour commute or occasionally if I skipped out at 8:30pm and got home to see it in the fading 9:30pm sunset during the long days of summer. Sundays I was usually asleep trying to catch up on rest before the next week's grind, or I was up fretting about negotiations or some other horribly tangled problem or potentially litigious issue.

M likes the ruralness of my home. The fact that the stars are sharp and brilliant at night because there are few competing lights. And the evenings are quiet but for the sounds of coyote or owls or a baying dog or two. Or perhaps the simple clip clopping of a horse and rider out for full moon amble. You can hear the wind as it sweeps softly through my little valley of woods and fields. It is possible to enjoy the silence.

I like to go out to see meteor showers because they can be breathtaking if the weather conditions are right. The last meteor shower I got up for was in the middle of the night. I bundled up in a bright yellow hooded down parka and went out at 2am to view. The best view, it turned out, was from the middle of the asphalt road that runs in front of the house. The best way to view it was by lying down in in the middle of the road and looking up at the heavens. G was asleep because she thinks my meteor shower viewing is rather silly, and the dogs and cat watched me curiously and anxiously from the porch windows. It was spectacular! I watched for a while and then, apparently, dozed off because I woke up and looked at my watch and it was an hour later! One dog and the cat remained at the porch windows (the other two must have bored and gone to bed) and I thought I had better move or I would frighten my neighbor in a few hours (he leaves for work at 5 am) if he came upon this bright yellow down blob asleep in the road. Luckily for the sleeping me, there is no other traffic on the road at that hour and little traffic during daylight. M says she will get up with me to view the meteors, and to make sure I don't fall asleep on town roads again.

M and I will see each other in a week or so. Her sister now insists on meeting me for even a short 10 minutes because M is so in love and is talking about moving to New England to be with me, and so her sister wants to check me out. I am fine with that, I understand and respect that those who love M want to be sure that I can love her well. But M says "I'm not sure when we'll come up for air, because I'm going to be fucking her for most of the few hours we have together" but sister is undeterred. Family is like that. Now I just have to be sure I pack an appropriate outfit in which to meet her sister, because I am only good naked for some things.

And life continues!

Apart

We circle in this constant state of mistrust and blame. Accusing words, the bitterness of silence, and sometimes, horribly, barely concealed contempt mark each phone call, each exchange. We fight about the mundane and the serious. What is surprising is to expect something different in the course of our conversations, to expect them to be different, more civil, less strained, though they have followed exactly the same course for the last 12 years. There is little joy or love left in any of our exchanges, just unrelenting stress. We define the ultimate clash in communication style and in basic values.

I read once that most happy couples have built up a reservoir of good will to keep them through tough times or conflict; that is not us, we seem to have horded missteps, misunderstandings, slights, raised voices, sharp words, insults, and deliberate wounds. We have horded these things to successfully slice away the flesh of whatever few glad moments we find we have left together.

G, we can openly and truthfully face the disappointing reality of our long dissolving relationship, the terrible reality that we each learned precisely how to irreparably damage a dream with our own hands, by failing to nurture it, by expecting each other to be different that who we are. Or we can do this with a blind and furious litany of on-going disappointments, betrayals, scars, broken promises, and blistering rage at a future which will never be. You can start to tote up your lists and I, mine. But you should know that the weight of my list is too much for me to bear, I can't keep adding to it. I can't hang onto disappointment and betrayal and rejection and loss anymore. This is no longer a blueprint for a reasonable life, a fulfilling life, a life I choose.

Your volatile temper has always dominated our relationship. And if you so decide, you can hate me or seek to hurt me to even the score, and there's nothing much I can do to stop you. But what I do know is this: You and I are two good people who somehow turned bitterness, emptiness, disappointment and loss into 12 years together, and we seemed to have forgotten that sometimes two people, however perfect or flawed or hopeful, are not better (for ourselves or each other) together than we you and I are, apart.

Hope

We have been separated now for over a year. I am here and you are thousands of miles away. I ostensibly came to help my aged mother, but it was a welcomed reprieve for us, a break from the near constant fighting, the perpetual misunderstandings and slights, the inescapable stress of two planets in constant collision.

We were not always this way, but mostly always this way from our very beginning. I always said our relationship was never legato, always staccato. I chose you because I wanted someone strong, someone who could withstand the intensity of my personality, my over-confident intellect, the drilling and penetrating nature of my judgements. Because I wanted to release myself from being that person, if only for a few hours each week, with someone who was emotionally and intellectually strong enough to take the burden of my nature from me. To lift it from me, to give me a sanctuary from myself. Perhaps this was always too much to ask of anyone. Everyone else has their own demons, their own insecurities, their own search for safe harbors.

I have lived most of my life unaware of how powerfully I impact others, however unintentionally. I am very small femme woman, never physically intimidating. I have simply done as I chose. Since I am late to this self-knowledge I often forget how others experience me. At my worst and most negative, I have been told that I can be intimidating and overwhelming, a kind of powerful inescapable intense force. I know I have eviscerated very powerful people at times easily, and wielded more power to affect outcome professionally than others in my orbit. Just by dint of personality. At my best and most positive, this same intensity and focus can make me very warm, charismatic and charming, a natural, enthusiastic, and visionary leader, and a confident and inventive problem-solver. People have always been attracted to these traits in me. And at my best I provide safe harbor for others, I am optimistic, eternally hopeful, and can lift up others who are in my universe.

But for me, these traits are a blessing and a burden. I like being able to help others. But there are times when I tire of being the strong one, the smart one, the brave one, the caring one, the one who eviscerates the powerful wrong-doers on behalf of the powerless, the one who is never afraid, the one who reassures and comforts, the one who will always make things right, the one you can trust with your soul.

I wanted you to be the one to take that burden from me. To shelter me. But you have your own demons, your own intense insecurities, your own burdens. I worried that I could not trust you to (or perhaps I just never let you) take care of me, in the most intimate way. This way that manifests for me through sex. There is a reason I like to be fucked, to be taken, to be over-powered by my lover. To bottom to her top. To trust her to care for me when I am weak, and afraid, and lost. To be completely vulnerable to her, to be naked to her. These are not simply metaphorical musings but literal ones, I manifest my vulnerability in my nakedness to you. I give you what I do not give others, I give you the presentness of my self, no past, no future, only what exists in this moment. I am not here to fix anything or plan strategically or tactically for a future action or to analyze a problem, I am just one naked body, existing only to respond to your touch.

But the anger and fighting have left us separate broken planetary bodies, without contact, except though passing words. It's hard to see this as an improvement over collision, but it is where we are. This has been our relationship for years. And while our state recognizes marriage equity, you have never asked me. And I have never asked you.

I have been away now for more than a year. I thought it would be good to finally come home, though we have fought on the phone, like nothing has changed. I thought we could try to connect again through renewed fucking, you might like it, you might want it. You might like the power to make me come for you. I bought you a new cock and harness for your birthday, hoping to inspire you. But you were suspicious of me. You had earlier pulled out the estrogen implant from your cervix to replace that lost through your hysterectomy, and you told me you decided not to take vaginal estrogen supplements. Your sex drive has disappeared. "I don't know," you said "it's hard to feel any interest in fucking (you) anymore." The words were plain and hit me squarely.

I am not sure what to do. I wasn't so sanguine that renewed sexual intimacy would allow us a base of closeness that would buffer the distance that comes with the clashes in our styles and personalities, but I had hope. Now I have none. And I don't know what to do.