Limerance

It took a long time for me to realize that my life at the farm could be real if I wanted it. Brian was more up front than I was. “We should give Leslie a drawer or something at the lake house.” I have “taken over” 16yo’s room every time I’ve been there in the past, and it’s something about which I feel bad. I don’t like displacing anyone, and I’m sorry for that part of it. But I also love his room and I’m grateful that he doesn’t seem to mind. I have a place in Brian’s house, and it makes me feel welcome.

When we’re at the farm, I just crash out on the couch. It’s comfortable, and there’s usually a dog. Listening to the rhythms of the farm is a whole essay in and of itself, and Tiina has half joked about how to accomplish a room for me at the farm many times…… or maybe she was never joking and just buy the damn air conditioner already, idk. I would build out their entire attic at my own cost if I planned on living there full time. I just cannot because I need Maryland’s infrastructure in terms of health care. Crashing on the couch is my decision, not Tiina’s. When she said, “I just want to keep Leslie forever,” I started thinking about how to make that happen for her.

The way I feel about it is that I can contribute to the financial cost of the farm if I’m the one receiving the benefit. If there’s any way I can figure out health care in Stafford, it makes total sense to say “for the low, low cost of building out your own space, it is a short walk from hanging out to sleep.” It’s my own health care that’s the holdup, not Brian and Tiina’s support of me. I think the reason Tiina and I work so well is that she’s my favorite person just to sit in silence with. Work gets done on both our parts, but our energies aren’t focused in the same direction. She likes diamond painting. I like writing. When I’m at the farm I shift to her sleep schedule because of it. Her presence matters while I’m blogging. It regulates my emotions in a way that writing alone does not.

Tiina also likes music while she’s working, and I am introduced to new stuff because of it. It’s been an adjustment to write and listen at the same time, but it’s recovering an old skill. I used to listen to music while I wrote all the time, and then just lapsed into complete silence. I am not altogether sure this was good for me.

So, the farm is very important to me in terms of equilibrium. Staying grounded, staying focused on more than myself, learning to live in community…. all of the things that have been missing for the last 12 years because I isolated myself on purpose and couldn’t get back out of it until I met Tiina. She was the first person to truly see me as I am, because I came armed with knowledge I didn’t in the past. I learned that having preferences and opinions was not bad, and I wasn’t going to be voted off the island for expressing them. I am allowed to have a full range of emotions and not the emotions other people say I can have. This is the life. This is what you want. Not fame and fortune, but people who let you be you.

The lake house is where I get to stretch out, thanks to a kindness from a kid.

16yo’s room is decorated to my taste, because he’s a book guy. There are very few traces of him as a little boy, but marks of the old man he is becoming. The kind who takes books seriously is my kind of guy. But we don’t talk about books. He, like all young readers, reads in the car. He reminds me of me at that age, blissfully unaware of what was going on thanks to any number of novels. I watch him, shoulders hunched, turning pages as if the world is on fire.

Boy, same.

At his age, I was lost in Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Nat Hentoff.

“Black Boy” and “Native Son” rewired my whole program. There are plenty of lessons for white people in those books, but what I took away was a sense of queer identity. The books’ focus on Blackness as a systemic concept allowed me to see all the ways queer society mirrors it. All the ways that ideas of excellence are both self-claiming and jumping for approval that will never come.

Excellence has to come from within and it cannot be tied to worth in this country. You cannot be good enough to deserve rights. There is no such thing as The Perfect Minority.

My entire family has a focus on social justice because I am a liberal Christian and they are Jewish. It is a shared sense of tikkun olam, a concept that is missing from the Christian world and is fundamental to who Jesus was as a person…… “if you heal yourself, you heal the world.” I spent a lot of time in youth group singing “let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.” Yet there was no actual concrete idea on how to do that. The manual is with my Jewish counterparts.

As I was telling a rabbi on Threads, “my Hebrew is mostly limited to transliteration as I struggle through the service.” I am not interested in conversion, just showing up in Jewish spaces as I am. However, I am delighted every single time Tiina says, “I think you are secretly a Jew.” Because that’s what happens when you follow the historical Christ, and not whatever is happening in mainstream America………. Christ, literally.

Here is what is resonating with me about this time in my life: it is a reclamation of things I wanted when I was younger.

• When I was in kindergarten and first grade, my next-door neighbors were Jewish. This led to celebrating holidays together and my dad performing an interfaith wedding for the adults. I am not new to being a Christian in Jewish spaces, I want it around me all the time. Christ’s own community is a better fit for me than the one we followers built for him. I am not saying the words he said when I attend the Episcopal church…. of course there are bits and pieces….. but by and large shul is the service he knows. I’m not saying Christ has never prayed the Prayer of Humble Access. I’m just saying he’s probably said the Kaddish more.
• It was my father’s idea that I should audit Hebrew school with the neighbor kids, and we got the call to move like a month after that. It’s a missed opportunity that weighs on my conscience like a rock. Picking up 10yo from Hebrew school is picking up the child I forgot there.
• I love listening and absorbing. Jewish life is different than my own, and I am learning new things every day. But what is different is that it is not the outside looking in. It is being welcomed into a Jewish community like my Galveston neighbors did in the 1980s. I love volunteering at Beth Sholom Temple, and it doesn’t have to come with a T-shirt, but I am grateful that it does because I wouldn’t look so fashionable without it.
• My prayer life is more textured than it used to be, because my outlook has changed. I want to work on real-world solutions instead of kvetching at the sky.

Luckily, converting to Judaism is not a requirement to be in Tiina’s family, but if it was, I would take it under advisement and make a counteroffer. I will not convert, but I will eat so much noodle kugel and brisket that no one will notice. Truthfully, me converting to Judaism would be on-brand, and yet not. I value where I come from too much to make that complete a leap. But what I am interested in is Jesus as a first-century Jewish teacher, placing him in his own context and not the professional Christian superhero that seems to guard American shores.

I constantly want people to get a grip. The land area we’re talking about in the Bible is about the size of New Jersey. It was not “the world.” It was “the world as they knew it.”

The problem is people taking the Bible literally and not seriously….. something that the Jews have been doing for thousands of years before Christians were even a twinkle. There is translation to be done, and face value is close to worthless. But Evangelicals keep telling themselves that they know the whole story as it was written.

Morgan Freeman:

They do not.

I wish that Jesus had been a blogger.

No, seriously. We’d have a lot less debate over what he actually meant if we’d had words clearly written by him while he was still alive and not recorded years afterward. If there is any truth to this whole “Jesus is coming. Look busy.” kind of attitude it’s that he’s going to show up and I’m going to be like, “my friend, you need to pull up a keyboard. We have work to do.”

“Jesus never said a word about homosexuality, therefore it cannot be essential to his teaching.” -Jim Rigby

Because I would like an actual Jew to lecture us on what the clobber passages mean, and he’s used to being in front of an audience.

But it is because of farm life and lake life that spiritually, everything is falling into place.

That doesn’t mean that this relationship with Tiina didn’t start out in abject fear of rejection. I was worried about everything. “What if she thinks I’m hitting on her when I just need a friend?” “What if I say I’m good with working with kids and it’s a dumpster fire?” “What if Brian and the kids don’t like me?”

Every single fear has been quieted enough that worrying about limerence has faded into real rhythms that are based on the ground. I am not just thinking about my chosen family, I am doing. I am asking myself “what can I do to be more helpful to the people around me because I require a lot of help in return?” When you are disabled, interdependence becomes important. At first I thought I was just wishing for a friend and trying to make it real. It took time to realize that Tiina was reaching out for me, too.

I did not want another situation in which I was constantly told I was valuable while also being discarded. This has not been that. This has been, “I have an incredible kitchen, and you are allowed to cook in it.” That is catnip to a former line cook with a standard small apartment setup. My apartment is HUGE, yet the kitchen is the size of a postage stamp. I do not understand.

At the farm, everything is above my head within easy reach. My own kitchen is a level of hell I’d rather not subject myself to, because the logistics are awful. I am currently searching for a new place, so the number one priority is never to have this kitchen layout ever again. Tiina says she pictures me in a little place in a walkable neighborhood like Fell’s Point. Now that I have a car, that is feasible. It wasn’t when I first moved to Baltimore because I needed to live near the Metro.

Tiina sees the whole picture as well- that we are enmeshed and separate. I love my life with her, Brian, and the kids. I also love my life in the city. Two or three hours is the perfect transition time from my house to the farm or the lake. I am using that time to educate myself through the cunning use of Audible. My next listen is “Kin,” by Tayari Jones.

The thing that Jones and I have in common is Oprah.

I have never written a book that got picked by her, but I have been interviewed by the executive producers of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” for the reaction to “She’s Come Undone” (Wally Lamb). It went very well, but I didn’t fit the vibe of the show they were trying to produce. My queer perspective was not represented, but that is probably due to the time and not whether my argument was valid.

So, I know that Oprah and I think on the same wavelength if nothing else. If Oprah liked the book, I probably will, too.

There was always going to be an inevitable backlash against Oprah because she’s just that famous, and no one’s behavior is purely unproblematic once they’re in their 60s. People in that backlash seem to have gotten amnesia and do not remember when Oprah was out front and center for queer people. Everyone talks about how brave Ellen was for coming out on national television. Valid, but Laura Dern and Oprah Winfrey both got death threats and deserve to be mentioned here.

History is repeating itself because Tiina and Brian are that kind of ride or die for me. Brian notices when I’m stressed out by oppression more than I do, because after this many years it just rolls off me and I don’t notice it anymore. I observe when people are cruel, but I try not to take it in. Brian and Tiina can see how it affects me without being queer themselves…… and because of their reactions in private, I would really hate to think what would happen if anyone actually messed with me in public.

Queer people are expected to have chill at homophobia and transphobia. Far easier to let the straight people go off leash. I am perfectly comfortable with being Olivia Pope while Brian and Tiina go Cyrus Beene.

Tiina even likes gardening. Hm.

The bottom line is that I am not constantly worried all of this could disappear tomorrow. I am safe, loved, and wanted. But it took everyone in the family to convince me of it, especially looking at it from the perspective of “this is where I’m from. This is where I want to go. My friends are a huge part.”

As long as I pay for the air conditioner.