So. This isn’t entirely in line with the themes of this blog, but it doesn’t totally fit with Urban Meliad either. I’m putting it here because it’s been a while and because… Because The Season Of Light started over a month ago and I’m having Polyam Feels and chewing on that thing where “queer adulthood” runs on a different time-line and frequently doesn’t necessarily include some of the major markers of “adulthood” (like monogamously pairing off, or having babies) that our cultures (cultures-of-origin?? I don’t even know) pass down to us.
As you folks will have probably picked up, if you’ve been reading this for a while (or know me In Real Life), my relationship with my mom is… substantially, noticeably, blessedly better than it was twenty years ago. And even ten years ago. But it’s still got some fraught elements.
Hoy.
I tell you.
Look. At this point, I can kind of laugh about it. It’s been 20 years of figuring out how to navigate this as two adults (Okay… 19 is maybe not an “adult” in anything but the legal sense, but you get the idea) who live in different places, and I can kind of see the humour in my mom being My Mom.
But it’s also kind of hard.
It’s weird how things line up. And I know I’m doing this in-around U.S. Thanksgiving. I’m writing in Canada, so the timing is entirely random. But it means there might be at least a few readers who can relate to this pretty hard right at the moment.
On the one hand: My mom is super game to include one of my metamours – and probably more than one, if her open door policy during my high school years is anything to go by – in her Xmas and Thanksgiving and similar celebratory-meal plans. She’s done up stockings for C to open multiple years in a row now.
Which, I realize, is fucking rare.
There aren’t a lot of polyamourous people whose parents are down to hang out with their kid-in-law’s other partners, so that’s pretty great.
On the other hand: Her reaction to me having more than one partner at a time was – last time this happened – to blink at me, murmur “I guess I thought you’d get tired of this”, and proceed to refer to my partner as “your friend” until the relationship… transitioned into whatever the hell it is now. Some kind of weird, slightly fraught-in-its-own-right family ties.
So we’ll see how she handles the news that I have two partners again, this time ’round.
I feel like a Bad Daughter.
I love that I make family laterally rather than in, or in addition to, inter-generational silos. But when my personal “family responsibilities” rub up against the expectations of my family of origin, I have a hard time.
I feel uncomfortable with the possibility that someone will want to know why I’m okay with dropping air fare to see my girlfriend but not okay with doing the same thing to fly out and see my sister at Christmas. (Never mind that I’m not Christian and, technically, neither is she. Never mind that leaving my wife behind to see my sister and her kids feels weird and gross in a way that leaving her behind while I see a different partner doesn’t at all).
I love that I’m a polytheist animist who celebrates Midwinter and builds a spider’s web of community connections with the end goal of having the venn diagram of my social groups be one big, inter-supportive circle that isn’t reliant on me to keep those connections going. But it still feels weird and uncomfortable and sad in a way I wish it didn’t, when my mom asks me what my plans for the 25th of December are and then, when I tell her my calendar is wide open that day, informs me that, actually, she’ll be in a different province, visiting the grandchildren. That all of my relatives with reliable paycheques would rather congregate in Calgary than turn up in Ottawa, where both the matriarch and the queer, low-income relatives, happen to live.
Sometimes I want to take a family photo.
To gather my girlfriend and my wife, and my metamours (difficult, at this point, since half of them live in one National Capital, and the rest live in DC and Baltimore), my Inheritor/Leather-Sister and my Sister-from-another-Mister who witnessed my marriage, my meta-metamours and my dom/me/s-in-law. The exes-who-are-still-family. And more: The femme poets who taught me, and their beloveds and their kids. The Yoots, who are in their 20s and even 30s now, who are raising up the cohorts coming up after them. The leather bikers who survived the plague, who are old enough to remember when being themselves wasn’t just unprotected but illegal. All my leather kin. All my queer fam. And take a fucking Sears Portrait Studio photo that we send out to all my relatives to say: THIS. This is my family. This is who danced at my wedding, right beside you. This is who I love, right alongside you.
I don’t want to have to ask “Is it alright if we include [metamour] in these plans?” Even knowing the answer will be “Of course!”
I want the reaction to “My vegetarian partner’s going to be visiting in late April” to be “Bring her to Easter brunch! I’m already making strata without the ham because the grand-kids’ll be here!”
I know that there are a LOT of queers out there who loathe Gay Marriage, and would rather burn the institution down that further infect our weird, non-traditional-family-building community with couple-privilege.
I know that there are a LOT of queers out there, too, who have little-to-nothing but shitty, invalidating-at-best memories of their families-of-origin and would rather create things newly out of whole cloth than try to create words like “unctie” so that our siblings’ kids have a word for us that fits both our genders and our fam-of-O’s kinship diagrams or structural language.
I have to admit… I’m not exactly on board. I want my queer fam to have words for themselves. I want them to be introduced to their nibblings as “This is Unctie So-and-so” from birth, so that it never feels strange or clunky in their mouths, so that my people can be their whole selves around their families-of-origin. I want to be able to say “wife” when I introduce my long-standing D/s partner and sweetheart. It’s just, I’d also like it if her other long-standing partners could include her as covered by their secondary-health-insurance benefits. It’s just, I’d also like it if I could say “wife” or “spouse” about more than one person at a time, should I be blessed with more than one life-partner who’s stayed with me for years, decades, my life-time, and to have those words not illicit awkward exchanges of eye-contact, or a refusal to engage, from my family-of-origin.
Most of the year, this is no big deal.
But it comes up hard when the nights get long and people start talking faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamily.
Tag Archive: fam
A few years ago, when I was an outreach worker for a province-wide Q/T health organization, I got to spend an afternoon with my wife and a bunch of other out-of-town (mostly) adults hanging out in Renfrew County for the local queer youth support/social group’s Big Day Out. THere were safer sex workshops. There was a drag workshop. And there was a dance-party (at which a friend of mine paid the party a surprise visit in her Elvis Gear, thus putting the king in The King, and the kids went nuts and wanted pictures. It was a good time.
BUT (or, more accurately,AND): I met a youngster who needed to talk about Stuff with someone who wasn’t an immediate part of her microscopic dating pool. Long story short: We emailed, she told me about feeling like The Only Queer in the Family, I mentioned some statistical probabilitiess, and she wrote me back to tell me she’d asked her Dad and he’d pointed out the small but significant group of homos amongst her cousins.
“I’m not the only one!” her email crowed.
Sometimes it’s a surprise, is what I’m saying.
In my case… it wasn’t entirely a surprise.
We were all just really, reeeeeeeeeeeally clueless.
But it still kind of floors me when I’m visiting my (bio) aunt, my (married-in) aunt, my masculine-presenting cousin + her super-femme lady-love[1], and my Big Gay Honourary Uncle… because it’s like: I don’t have to flag! They all KNOW!
It’s like some part of my brain forgets that they’re my relatives, that one of them has known me since I was born, and most of the rest have known me since high-school, and all I see is a house full of hippie-ass creative queers (MAH PEOPLE!) whom I don’t see every day… and I suddenly want to be all “So, my wife and I went to this queer slow-dance thing last weekend…” while re-applying my hot-pink lipstick and talking-with-my-hands so much that my shoulders are getting in on the action.
I feel like those kids in Renfrew, going a little hay-wire just because there are Other Queers Around… even though 90% of who I hang out with, these days, are big ol’ homos.
It’s a bit bizzarre, to tell you the truth.
And yet.
I’m not the only one!
TTFN,
Ms Syren.
[1] Who totally gave me the Femme Dazzling Smile when she met me, because we do actually recognize each other, but I wasn’t expecting it, and it was really nice when she did it. 😉
So, this morning, I tweeted this:
Family grows in a lot of ways. It makes me happy that my wife’s girlfriend/servant sourced the soil for my garden, that my wife/property arranged the delivery and built the bedframes in the first place. It makes me happy that our sweetheart is willing to come and move soil by the bucket-full, and that my metamour’s roommate is willing to do the same. (Admittedly, part of this is just that they are both avid gardeners and all of six blocks from my house, but still. They come. This is wonderful).
So. The garden where I will (fingers crossed, successfully) grow the food that will (partially – it’s only two beds so far) feed my people? Is being built by my people. How awesome is that?
I don’t know what I want to say about this. I want to write about find your quarto, which you’re only going to understand as a reference if you’re intimately familiar with Cathrynne M. Valente’s Palimpsest. I want to write about how all families grow, how my wife and I finding another person to share our lives with, in whatever shape that takes, isn’t all that different from my sister giving birth to her-&-her-fiance’s first child. I want to write about how Kinky Femme’s extended poly family, her leather fam, stepped up to help her father move, and that he’s starting to understand that there’s enough love to go around, that you don’t have to police it or ration it. That I’m learning this, too.
I want to write that Your heart is an organ the size of your fist a TARDIS: It’s bigger on the inside and able to grow, as required, to hold everything it needs.
Maybe this is just the NRE talking – I wouldn’t be the first to come over all twitterpated and rose-coloured-glasses under these circumstances. And maybe it’s the sunshine and the fact that I get to grow an actual, in-the-ground garden with food and edible flowers and perenial herbs and all the rest of it. That my soul is going to be fed this year in a way that it hasn’t been in a long, long time. And that definitely has an effect on one’s outlook, I don’t mind telling you.
But either way, I’m looking at my growing family with a tremendous amount of joy in my heart.
[…] we move
four cubic meters of trucked in soil
by bucket chain
hand to hand
grinning
in the fading evening
I scatter the seeds
of rainbow chard and kale
more than cold-tolerant
tender and hardy
both
the food of our people
From “Cultivation” (by me)
TTFN,
Ms Syren.
syrens 