Tag: children

It Just Is

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How do you know when it’s time to unplug? What do you do to make it happen?

When I know I need to go off the grid, it’s for one of two things. The first is that I’m trying hard not to get my crazy spatter on anyone else. The second is that I have something important to write and I don’t want that flow to be interrupted. Therefore, I am connected by an umbilical cord to my desktop/Fire HD, but not the Internet. Local files are a thing, people. Look into it. 😉

To me, unplugging means refocusing my attention on myself. It’s not that I’m actively trying to be selfish. It’s just that who should have the time to give me what I need when I am already actively spending time with me? I mean, there’s no commute.

When I shut down, I shut down completely. I’m sure it irritates the living hell out of people, but when I get like that, I don’t have the bandwidth to take on what other people are thinking and feeling. I recede into myself as my brain tells me that no one needs me, anyway. It’s not the truth. It’s the lie depression uses to get me where it wants me. My work to do is to raise my self esteem so that I’m not so needy, because no one likes to think of themselves that way, even if they have cerebral palsy, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and anxiety. I’m not needy in that I’m an emotional vampire. I’m needy because I genuinely have a harder time navigating the world. Because I don’t look like I have CP or bipolar, people treat me as if I have none of those things because perception is reality. In order to receive the kind of patience I need, it’s imperative for people to understand why I need them. Alternatively, I will be just as attentive to people who confide those things in me. It is not about me always needing things. It’s about both people finding someone who has their back. I am more dedicated to my friends than most people because I realize that if I need them, I need to appreciate them more as well.

I just navigate those relationships slowly, because I’m a lot and I know it. Even Sam was never truly on the inside, and not because I couldn’t see a future with her. It was that even though we were connected, it hadn’t been very long. I always trusted my friends more than I trusted her, because it would take time for all that to come out and we only lasted three weeks. What Sam did was devastating to me, because I had to come up with all the answers as to why on my own. All the answers I would have given her had she asked questions before busting my fairy tale. The resolution I received is that she was too pragmatic to take dreaming in stride. She seemed threatened by thinking bigger rather than excited. I believe the relationship lasted as long as it should’ve, and I’m glad it was easy to move on. It would have just been another relationship in which I’d say too much to fill the silence.

I always think there’s a combination of words that will unlock people. They won’t open up if they’re threatened by dreaming into the future or dealing with conflict. One always leads to the other if they’re threatened by both. I want to live bigger than this, despite my actions to the contrary. I had good reasons for disappearing from everything, because I needed so much and wouldn’t tell anyone about it. I wrote everything down, self-soothing to the extent that I’m able. One of the tapes I have that needs destroying is “why do you think everyone else needs to save you?” One answer is that I don’t have shame about asking for help, because I know how far I’d go for the people I love when I’m at full strength. I have an extraordinarily long track record in terms of absolutely going out of my mind when my friends are in trouble. They have to talk me down from the ceiling and they do, unless I can tell that they’re in such bad shape that they’re unable to run on their own power. In that case, I just do things without asking. I will clean someone’s house even when they’re yelling at me to stop because I can see that depression has gotten the better of them and I can’t let them die from bacteria, despite the fact that depressed people often kill themselves slowly, because they have no ownership of their future. All they can see is a lifetime of too much emotional pain. Death is not a gunshot to the head, but seriously not caring about your health because of death’s relief.

It’s the monster on your back and the ghost in your head, your diseased brain trying to protect you by emotional torture so you’ll isolate in protection of yourself and others. They think you’re too needy, anyway. I don’t feel needy, I feel fair. You give me a hand up, and both of mine are yours.

I also internalize that when I ask for help, people think that it’s not mutual because obviously their issues are too much for me. If I am projecting that, it’s not you. It’s the weight of the world. It’s not your problem that’s weighing me down, but the mass I take on just walking through a mall. Therefore, it makes me write differently, because I write to illustrate an idea, and it makes it seem more dramatic than it really is because I’m trying to craft a page. Trying to make up for the lack of being able to see your eyes, so that you see how deeply I’m feeling whether you’re in front of me or not. I am not actively trying to be more dramatic, I’m trying to make sure you get it. The more granular with detail I can be, because you’re not seeing body language or tone of voice. Even the way I talked about a problem would be different in person than in writing, because I have trouble processing emotion in front of people and need the safety of a delete key, even though I’m a dumbass and don’t use it as frequently as I have needed.

I retreated into myself, having fewer and fewer conversations in person, because it was far too easy to reveal myself in my letters than a cup of coffee relaxing on the couch. That way, I could have more emotional bravery than I’d ever have sitting down together, because I am not processing your emotions at the same time I’m processing mine. I don’t have to handle watching you cry or yell, because it will rip me to pieces and I avoid that at all costs. When I am reading your words, I am imagining your world. Imagining you telling your story as I tell you mine. I think it makes meeting in person easier, because if you’ve already written out what’s driving you up the wall about the other, time together can be all laughs. Writing is how I get to the bottom of some deep, dark shit. That way, you already know how I feel when we meet, and if the issue is not resolved, it’s easier to respond with empathy because you’ve already digested how I feel, sort of like being prepared for a test. If we have a conflict, I’m not blindsiding you and expecting you to have all the answers, because you already know what I think the problem is and talking is for answers.

I have a habit of popping off without making it clear how angry I am about an action and how much I love the person with whom I’m fighting. Harry Windsor talks extensively about this in “Spare,” how he often went into a blind rage everyone called “Red Mist.” It’s something that many people with PTSD feel, and you can’t tell me he doesn’t have it. We both have been through the shit, except his trauma isn’t even on the same playing field. To be perfectly blunt, we both have PTSD, but I don’t have a kill count. This is not to say that I think Harry did anything wrong. He is a precious gift from God and I hope he recognizes that though he’s been treated like crap by his family, other people are ready and willing to take their place. I think that’s part of the queer in me. We know intimately what it’s like to live with chosen family and not because we want to…… although it’s funny, I have never seen funnier conversations between old queers and young, that we are irritated by straight people accepting us because now it means we do get invited to things. We do get pressured to have kids. We now have to put up with all kinds of bullshit that’s new to us- how to act like we belong when we haven’t the first clue as to how. That’s because deep down, we don’t know whether your homophobia is overt or uneducated. It’s not that there’s never homophobia, it’s that deep down, white people have been told that being white is better with a horrifying history of trying to prove it, and straight people have been told that homosexuality is a sin that deserves jail and death. Those messages don’t fade overnight. We know that because we feel the same way as everyone else. It’s one thing to work through believing that homosexuality is a sin. It’s another to work through people treating you as if you are one.

So, even allies with the best of intentions make mistakes on two levels. The first is due to the deeply ingrained message that homosexuality is wrong, and the second is not knowing how to communicate with a gay person, because they’re enmeshed in a system they don’t see and don’t wonder what it is we’re rebelling against. We’re not different, we’re threatening. Straight people who are fully accepting of their gay friends/relatives still work through their own biases, and gay people with straight friends/relatives work through those prejudices from the opposite vantage point. We aren’t responsible for your education, and yet we are because we don’t want to live in this society where our lives are threatened because of our sins in the Bible; they have no bearing on the law and people shouldn’t make them exclusive……. but somehow have.

Dealing with everyone’s homophobia, including the fear we have of ourselves, is everyone’s problem. It’s not dissimilar from eradicating racism, including the kind that’s internalized because of the messages we receive every day. Our lives depend on whether straight, white, and cis people are threatened by us to varying degrees. We are making progress in the US, sliding backward…. while people in other countries have no such luxury. Being gay in the US is a much smaller deal than being gay in Uganda.

We find more ways to separate than connect. Women are still dependent on the level of men’s misogyny. Children are still dependent on their parents and rightfully so, but experience a large range of situations from their parents’ ideas on whether they are a being or a possession.

Unplugging and protecting myself from feeling all of that is sometimes necessary, because I stop talking when I feel like if I ask for help it will count as a black mark against me. If I don’t have help, I need more space. I need to write longer. It’s what helps me rely on myself, but often leads to the pendulum swinging too far and not wanting to say anything about anything, ever.

If I have a problem with you and I take the time to lay it out, you’re important to me. That’s because it takes an enormous amount of emotional fortitude to say what I really feel and not fear a response. To not torture myself once a letter leaves my hands. To know that I will deal with what comes, instead of focusing on all the bad things that could happen if you know how I feel and don’t agree with it. If you don’t tell me how you feel, I will free up that time and energy to be able to give it to someone else.

When my mother died, I lost someone who would help me if she was able, so she’s the part of my life where I feel the most vulnerable. It freed up a lot of my time and bandwidth, just love with nowhere to go because I wasn’t trying to replace her. I was only trying to fill up the hole in the most practical ways I could, like turning my attention in the hours I used to spend with her on the phone. I can’t replace her personality, but I can reorient how I spend my time. I can purposefully make friends with moms both older and younger so I feel that energy without having it myself. It’s a huge mountain to climb when you realize you don’t have a mother anymore. I do not mean in a practical sense. I mean that you are not in the active process of being the child born to her, and grief kills those parts of you so that your personality doesn’t resemble who you were before. There are just dead spots, searching for something to fill them.

The one thing I didn’t do was zone out, seeking pleasures like being drunk or high to avoid processing. I can be very proud of the fact that those things didn’t lure me away from myself. Most people can’t imagine doing that whole thing straight edge, because I never put anything in my body that would make me feel disconnected from reality. Now that I’m several years out, I’ll have a beer once in a while. It’s a treat like a Snickers, not something I do all the time. What I found is that alcohol makes my depression worse, so I can’t treat it the same as soda. I didn’t quit drinking because I needed to stop, I only quit drinking most of the time because it made me feel better. It gave me more bandwidth to deal because I wasn’t putting off until tomorrow what could be grieved today. Nothing compounded because I wasn’t kicking the can down the road. I sat in agony daily, just waiting it out because there’s nothing you can do but let time work. You never get over it, but you do see that you’re allowed to have happiness again eventually.

This is because when my mother died, I was single. It caused so much pain that she’d never know how my life turned out. I could say I’m grateful for that because I’ve made so many mistakes, but I’m not. The idea that Sam was my girl made me so happy, and crushed that my mother would never meet her or her stepkids had we moved in that direction. My favorite and most heartbreaking moments were dreaming about my mother and Sam having so much in common, and being so different. I got the best of what I loved about my mother professionally without the things about her personality that I didn’t like. Therefore, Sam actually reminded me a lot of Texas musicians, and my mom was one. An amalgam of everything I loved about Texas without the baggage of being from there. It was difficult dealing with being in the best music program in the country (TMEA, not local schools), and the homophobia within. I went to a performing arts high school in the middle of gay Disneyland and I still got bullied by kids in church choir.

Thinking about my mother not meeting anyone else I might date is devastating, because I don’t have that “bringing someone home to meet my parents” feeling yet…. and when it happens, there will be a deep place of sorrow inside me. I think about my future wife being pregnant and I just crumble at the thought. I think of my sister getting pregnant as well in the same way, even though we’re both childless and like it. It’s not the thought of Lindsay being a mom that drives me, but the part of my mom that would live in the kid. Neither of us want to have kids, and yet it would have been interesting to have seen what those kids would have been like. When I was thinking about getting pregnant, I was excited about all the ways I’d see my family in them. Getting pregnant was only about genetics, because I didn’t think of that until after my mother died. Lindsay and I both thought the same thing, we just didn’t have passion or drive about the idea. It jut exists.

You can acknowledge that a story would have been great without writing it. However, in my case, I have no idea who I want to commit to, so my dreams are based on what my partner will bring to the table and not what I want. I am not looking for a person in a certain set of circumstances, just being open to the fact that I won’t know anything up front and just be open. Women are naturally driven to have kids, and sexual orientation doesn’t play into it. Some just have more maternal drives than others and I need to be ready for it. If the person I want feeds me intellectually, they could probably ask me to dive off the Empire State building while singing “The Star Spangled Banner” and I’d at least think about it.

I can hit the high B flat when I unplug.

Mother’s Day 2023

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I just gave up.

I gave up on the idea that Mother’s Day isn’t hard now. It’s something that can’t be explained to someone who hasn’t lost their mother, because they don’t see all the manipulation that goes into marketing until after they don’t have to buy a gift.

Your mother’s death changes you in ways you won’t be able to understand until she’s been dead at least a few years. You can’t process that kind of loss overnight, nor really in your lifetime. You don’t release that kind childlike, animalistic grief. You learn to live around it. When your mother dies, you will see memories and feel emotions you haven’t felt since the events occurred. Sometimes, you will actually be seven at the time of her death. Sometimes, you’ll be an adult and feel seven and 13 and 45 all at the same time. This is because just like with machines, the computer in your brain is working on many cores and threads, and you’re experiencing the pain of several things at once from different areas of your life. You may not even realize that you’re doing it, but my example is blanking out.

When grief gets hard, my mind separates from my body. My thoughts are pictures, and I get lost quickly. When I come up for air, I have no idea how much time has passed. In the first three months, it could be a minute or five or ten, with no way of predicting how long the blank out would last. Just because my body has gone slack doesn’t mean my brain isn’t trying to protect me. Isn’t trying to see the path I was going down here and think, “well, we gotta shut this down.” When it’s not that bad, I see memories. When it is, the picture is akin to snow on TV. It depends on whether my brain’s mode of operation is through the problem or it’s too big an idea not to really hurt, so let’s just shut down that whole thing. I lag as easily as an old gaming rig with shitty wireless. Bringing the network back up takes time.

Where this is most acute is the time I didn’t get. My relationship with my mother went up and down like a roller coaster, based on the limitation of not growing up with queer people and then winning the home version. Her dreams for me were slashed, because she focused on all my limitations instead of my strengths in order to make sure I didn’t seem all that weird to parishioners and friends. I am not sure it ever really stopped bothering her that I was so different. She grieved for the tape in her head that was planning my wedding (think of the time). You don’t let go of that kind of fundamental loss, You learn to live around it.

The tape in my head that’s been running since I came out, so 31 years, is that my mother thinks I’m defective. I couldn’t help but believe she wanted a refund. My dad at least had gay students around him in grad school, so at least he’d met a gay person before I was born. If my mother had, she never said so.

Thus began the most unhealthy relationship of my life. I looked around for every queer person I could find. Either they were rumored to be queer or they looked like it based on pictures/videos I’d seen of their styles and mannerisms. I noticed butch women and effeminate men and wanted to run toward them, like a black kid raised by a white family and just as intense. I wish my mom had been like the white mom who looked around with their black child to ask them how to care for black hair.

My mother simply resigned herself to the fact that she had to look like the PFLAG type, but she didn’t have to be happy about it. She came to a gala where I was receiving an award for being part of the team at HATCH (Houston Area Teen Coalition of Homosexuals) that went out to local churches and spoke about our experiences. She was dating a Republican, and focused on Sheila Jackson Lee the whole time, because said Republican had told her there wasn’t a more dangerous place in Washington than between her and a TV camera.

I thought his joke was hilarious. The fact that my mother didn’t even seem to be proud of me? Not so much. I think that’s because one of my talks was at a church where she was employed. Again it was the message of “you will not do anything to embarrass this family.” Now it was her job, not my dad’s….. skipping over the fact that the church had invited HATCH in the first place, so why worry? I was a preacher’s kid. Like I don’t know how to work that particular crowd. Jesus had my back that day, and it made me happy that people were actually curious and not judgmental. One woman even asked me if it was true that gaydar was real. You could just tell. That was interesting because I knew what she was asking was if people could tell that about her. It wasn’t necessarily because she was queer (thought it could have been true). It could have been because she didn’t want people to think she was gay. Back then, that was not a good thing. We’re not talking about legislatively. We’re talking about violence on the street. It was perfectly acceptable to bash the unacceptable in the head.

Everyone focuses on the day that Harvey Milk was shot, when they should have been focused on “The Twinkie Defense.” There should have been some language of the unheard about that. Dan White, Harvey Milk’s executioner, told the jury that his homophobic behavior was created by his diet of junk food, and he was acquitted. He was Derek Chauvin before Derek Chauvin. No one also seemed to notice that Harvey Milk wasn’t the only one killed. So, that defense was used for a straight person as well, and would have been bullshit if the trial wasn’t for both of them. You cannot tell me that would have worked had the Mayor of San Francisco been the only one shot…. that he’d been driven to murder by junk food.

What would it have been like if my mother had gone with me through the problem rather than shutting down and asking me to pretend I wasn’t all that different from her? I could be gay as long as it never came up. The subject was off the table. Dana told me that my mother never looked her in the eye, and I don’t know whether that was hyperbole or not, because surely it couldn’t be true. I asked my mom about it, and she said she wasn’t aware of it and would make an effort. That was the beginning of redemption and resurrection.

It didn’t stop the jealousy of families that had two gay kids, because at least the siblings had each other. My sister is wonderfully and beautifully made and I am not saying that my life would have been better if she’d been born like me. No, I’m talking about in the randomization that happens before you are born. The story before you came into it. It hurt that there was no one hurting just like me. They were all hurting differently.

The mask I wore as a preacher’s kid was the mask I wore for the rest of my mother’s life…. most of the time. I let her in a little more when we were living in the same city, but mostly we chatted for hours on the phone about nothing. It was good because we’d stick to teaching, music, and diet soda. We had a ton of fun, but it wasn’t all rainbows.

Ironically.

The pain of superficial interaction vs. the fun my mother had together will be a recurring theme, because her different moods come at different times. She was a saint in my eyes, because of the way she took care of other people. What I cannot say is that I can rest in how she felt about me.

This is because her friends have told me how proud they are of me, how she never let anyone get away with homophobic comments, how she was so proud of me and loved me to bits. I am quite sure all of that is true. I wore the mask, so did she.

What she didn’t do was ask me about my life, because it would mean telling her about women who she also thought should get with the program. “Don’t embarrass” me was the whole show. She was horrified by Meagan, but she never would have said so. It wasn’t because she didn’t like her. It was because now me being gay was a thing she had to deal wth up close and personal. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Meagan’s mother was convinced that Meag had been perfectly straight until I came along. So, they should have talked to each other. I also never got to tell her that her daughter pursued me, not the other way around. There is no way I got a toaster on that one. If I’d been in any way bold enough to stand up for myself, I would have said “you’re going to have to look up ‘butch’ in the dictionary. Have a Coke and a smile and shut the fuck up.” I would have been grounded for months, but it wouldn’t have been untrue. Hanging out with a gay person doesn’t make you gay any more than hanging out with Indians makes you Indian.

It’s a concept my mother never really got, either. She thought my relationship with this older woman had set me on a bad path. She did, but not for the reasons she thought early on. She all at once read me the riot act for being gay and got tired of raising a lesbian daughter, so let someone else do it.

From my perspective, I came out to myself when I was about 10. It led to a massive depression that my mother attributed to me being lazy and telling me I couldn’t sleep all day. I was a ten year old, not a teenager. It wasn’t teenage angst. It wouldn’t have gone unnoticed today.

I didn’t meet the emotionally abusive adult until I was almost 13. That’s a lot of time to sit in my bedroom and wonder what in the hell was wrong with me, because no one else was going through it in my circle of friends. Still aren’t, as far as I know. As in, some have gay/trans relatives, but no one had struggled or is struggling with their own sexuality from my elementary and junior high school circle of friends.

I mentioned this to Daniel, and he thought I was picking on him for not standing up for me. I was not. I was telling him the reality of what happened, and how I might get along with his friends, or I might not…. and that was my concern, not his.

But, to get back to being almost 13, I wasn’t interesting as a love interest, but I was the picture of a mark. Rejected from everything I knew. Getting bullied for legit no reason except Baptists gonna Baptist. It was relentless, and for all the emotional turmoil that this relationship brought me, it was a haven as well. She could have gotten fired for people knowing at her school. Her trauma wasn’t over yet, either.

My trauma was that Houston was pretty accepting, but the further you went from it, the worse it got. That’s where I learned code switching. Being able to talk to a room of people who were horrified by me and saving my hurt for later.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking that something is wrong with me. Fundamentally wrong. Internalized homophobia is strong with this one. At the same time, there is actually something wrong with me and it’s frustrating to an enormous degree…. both mentally and physically. I often don’t have enough spoons to donate energy to other people, and that’s when I really isolate, because I feel like I have nothing to contribute to the conversation.

The fact that all of this started at ten years old is frightening.

I don’t want to be the person that spreads the message that Mother’s Day is bad. Just that it’s not easy for everyone, and those people deserve comfort, too.

The War Daniel, Part II

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe a risk you took that you do not regret.

I took a risk in getting close to The War Daniel, and it paid off in spades. Yes, I went through so much, but I am hugely capable of dealing with things so it never felt like a burden. I know I came across as harsh, but that’s because I wasn’t holding him while we talked. I hope he understands, even if we never reconcile, how much he changed my life for the better just by having the courage to ask me to marry him… because it showed that he was dreaming of a better life down the road as well. I want nothing more out of him than that; I want him to find his best life, even if I’m not involved. I want him to be Secretary of Veterans Affairs or a war journalism professor or a lazy bum on a beach in a country where you can live on $20 and a coupon for frozen yogurt.

I just want him to live like he means it, because that’s what I want for myself. To free myself of the bonds that make me think the world is better off without me. The War Daniel and I have both gotten close, and it’s an institutional memory of what we hate most about ourselves, because it matches up so closely. I spoke the other day about my conversations being tough on anyone who doesn’t live on my “Island of Misfit Toys,” and Daniel knew enough right off the bat he bought a house.

Can you see what that means to me? Out of all the people in the world that could have picked me, he did. He knew every single thing he needed to know and nothing frightened him, because if I’d been through it, so had he…. Just from vastly different perspective. In fact, the only thing that gave me pause before I said yes was wondering why a Doc of that magnitude was even interested in me. Who even am I next to all that?

I empathized with his problems to the point of not being able to move at all. My mirror neurons were constantly overloaded, and it was because we were having the same experience. I was awed with him because I felt worthless, and vice versa. Neither one of us believed we truly deserved each other, and it showed quickly. However, I won’t ever believe that he’s not the perfect match for me, because we have just enough in common and just enough difference to change lives just by being us. We change each other all the time.

Cora is part of my story now, and in some sense, we are raising a child together. This is because my mother love kicked in the moment she realized she wanted that… a queer mom to help her translate her feelings so that her parents could hear her better. To teach them queer history so that they knew what our triggers were so that at least when they hit them, they’d know enough to apologize. I needed us to be one big happy family, three parents and a child, because I can’t think of a child that needs it more than Cora.

I cannot underestimate how much danger I feel she is in, both with Texas laws and attitudes toward trans women in particular, and to get even more granular, if white trans women have it bad, the darker your skin gets, the worse the crime statistics. Everything in that regard is par for the course.

When she told me how bad it was down there, my first reaction was “I want you to move in with me. Can we make that happen? I don’t even know if I can make that happen, but we can work on it together.”

She told me that she’d be open to it, and that she’s wanted it since I said it. Whether The War Daniel is an active participant or an NPC is of no consequence. They can walk away from me, but I will never in my lifetime walk away from her. That is my daughter out there, and I dare you to prove it’s not true. The only evidence you don’t have is DNA. Good luck. God bless.

So now I need to start researching the best place for us. If it was a cheap city, ideally it would have enough room for both her parents to visit, together or separately. It’s not that I have my hopes up, it’s just that if you commit to a kid, their whole famn damily comes with them. It doesn’t matter how they react to me, because I can only control what I’m putting out. So, The War Daniel is free to tell me he made a mistake and free to move on all in one breath, because I can’t care about him anymore. I need to care about her.

I have entirely pure motives because I can’t afford to be wrong on this one. I cannot live with a world in which I do not do everything I can to convince Daniel to get her the fuck out of NE Texas. I left because I got tired of fighting the system. I needed to live with other grown-ups.

So do I regret opening my heart so quickly to Daniel? Absolutelyfuckingnot. I got the best relationship of my life out of it. I just can’t be the only one getting up in the middle of the night when the baby is telling us she needs help. My best hope is that he does choose me again, for all sorts of reasons, a lot of them practical. I had to let go of wanting a man I couldn’t have because all of this is bigger than me. But that doesn’t mean I am counting on it. That would be insane. I want to be wanted, and a campaign for anything else is beneath me.

I think the biggest reason I’m loud on the Internet where it comes to Daniel is that he knows it’s here. He can look it up. He can see that he is wanted, loved, and cherished even when he irritates the shit out of me. He struggles with feelings of inadequacy, too, so more than anything I want him to know that I love him despite his flaws and failures because he loved me in that same extraordinary way. There were also so many callbacks to our childhood that we could pass on to Cora, and it’s not as fun doing it without it being a tennis match.

I took a big swing, and I’ll hit home plate one way or another. I can support Cora from a distance or she can live with me, but there’s not a person alive who, if they had a chance to get a trans kid out of Texas, wouldn’t.

She Stopped the Tape

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe a positive thing a family member has done for you.

Bryn stopped the tape that I was worth nothing.

She didn’t do it with her words, although she did that, too. It was more than that. She told me I had something to say, and is perfectly fine with me going big or going home. We have had so many moments of just going home, my favorite thing in life. I was kidding her the other day that I loved being at her house, because I spend a lot of time there on Facebook Messenger video calls that are inordinately long because we’re both talkers (to each other, not so much in a crowd), and we don’t discuss people so much as concepts.

The biggest is that if you experience childhood trauma, and ours comes from many different sources, you are navigating the world with third degree burns and it changes everything around you. This is not a slam on either one of my parents, because my childhood trauma is not rooted in them, but in coming out privately at 13 and publicly just before I was 15. Coming out privately was the wrong tack, because I trusted the wrong person. It went from something sweet to a disaster very, very quickly.

This is because I lost myself in that relationship.

Like a lot of other women, I would imagine. She was a singer, and everyone was awed by her voice and treated her with that reverence all the time. Who even was I next to all that? Yes, she was gorgeous and I noticed. The problem came in where I was never sure whether she noticed or not. I feel like she noticed all of it, and before we could even have that conversation in an open and honest way, she’d already done things by inference that would have made being honest feel like a lie.

If you know, you know. She treats every friend like that. I was just the youngest. She has a tape in her that says you can’t be intimate with someone unless you’re romantic with them. And, of course, she’s never told me any of this, I’ve just watched it for decades. THAT’s why I freaked out at being told I was a woman she’d like to know.

Moving to Portland was enlightening as I watched several adults go through the same spectrum of emotions I did starting three months before I turned 13. In the very beginning, love was the type of excitement I felt at seeing my parents after a long day at school. Within a year, my hormones had kicked in, and at that moment, she moved away. Back then, Dallas and Portland were both long-distance calls. So I’d sneak off to talk to her when my parents weren’t looking and became the girl that sat by the mailbox, because if I didn’t and something came for me, my mother would confiscate it. Looking back, this is exactly what she should have done. I am just not the sort of person that backs away from large emotions, and the tape within me was “she needs me.”

In that time and in that place, I can believe it was true. I would like to believe that she couldn’t be honest with anyone else, because in order to function, she had to be her singer personality all the time. She didn’t want anyone to know her problems, either, because I was also very quiet about my struggle with being queer at all, much less a relationship with this woman on top of it.

I remember one friend being completely objective and shooting the shit out of all my assumptions, likening it to battered wife syndrome because there’s no way in hell I should have been responsible for being the keeper of those secrets at 14. I don’t keep them now. I will talk about what it was like, but only with Bryn, because she was there. It means a lot to me that someone who knows me that intimately is now my biggest cheerleader.

What Dana (ex-wife, beloved in my memory, no chance we’ll reconcile for those just joining us) failed to understand was why she couldn’t help me. She’d been roped into those people and that situation for as long as she’d known me. I never would have believed it was emotional abuse coming from her because to me, she had just picked a side, like everyone else when I started talking about what happened. I feel like she played all 90 minutes, but the score was equal until someone objective who didn’t know anyone in the situation at all won it for us on a penalty kick. I would have run from anyone who looked at the situation in a subjective manner, and we lived in the same house.

I know it was devastating for her that I believed someone else so easily, and you can’t imagine how much empathy I had for that. At the same time, I had never backed away from the situation so hardcore that I could look at what happened as it being in the past. I couldn’t be objective about any of our friends, including the women that came after me in the bubble that felt illicit. Her behavior didn’t stop, she just changed people, either dumping them so that they felt like they lost everything because they’d become just as suckered in as me…. or walking away when they realized their own sanity was being tested.

It surprised me when I laid all this out that people believed her charming, lovebombing personality and chose to ignore what had happened not only to me, but to their other friends. They watched all the fallout from every relationship this woman torched, and were so eager to be the chosen one that my words didn’t even matter. It wasn’t that I was right, it was that I couldn’t hack it. There was nothing wrong with what she was doing, there was a failure in me emotionally.

I could never explain to people who weren’t really listening that I’d been watching her do this to people since before I turned 13. That I knew what she was doing to her friends from decades of experience watching her do it. That me coming to Portland was the last thing that happened, not the first thing I saw.

The most fucked up thing ever is that she would do this in the congregation in her partner’s church, energies changing all the time between friends so that no one could ever be objective about anything. The more rocky it got, the more she asked of the church, like making her Minister of Music instead of the choir director when no pastoral care ever came from her at all. She was not the kind of person that cared about anyone else’s feelings. She was the type of person that wanted to put on a show about how much she cared. If the person that needed something wasn’t in her direct circle, their needs went unmet. I didn’t realize the extent of the show until it happened to me.

We stopped talking about anything important. She’d dumped me long ago because of course, she never did anything wrong. I was a problem. The biggest sleight of hand that she ever pulled was twofold. The first was when I went and told her about a conversation that I’d had with her friends where I was FNG (fucking new guy). They were very protective of her, and it devolved into them trying to prove to me that they knew her better than I did. That was a game I didn’t want to play, because the way I would “win” wouldn’t look good and would only anger them more. So, again, I told her about this because it was hurting me.

Then, several days later her partner confronted me and told me that she’d said that I was starting fights with her friends and she didn’t want to see that out of me anymore. So, I just took on all the emotions of these women who didn’t have a fucking clue and I was the bad guy, even though it was a game in which I’d already tapped out. I was done.

Then, years later, she picked me as a soloist for a requiem we were doing with a community orchestra. It was a big damn deal, my first time on a fairly large stage. She waited until dress rehearsal to have her moment in which she said that I was the closest thing she’d ever had to a daughter, and hearing me sing was like watching her little girl grow up… when that relationship had been gone for both of us from the moment I bothered to call her on her bullshit. Because no one does that. Ever.

I am sure that people believed the show, and I wasn’t going to embarrass her in front of everyone. I was just trapped in utter and complete bullshit…. which is why I married Dana and didn’t even bother telling her. I wanted to destroy her dreams of doing the same thing to me at my wedding…. which Dana and I never had. We got all the paperwork done and would have probably gotten married at Episcopal Church of the Epiphany if we’d put any effort into doing such a thing. I remember Dana asking her priest if we could get married there, and our priest asking us how long we’d been together. Dana said, “seven years,” and our priest said, “so it’s serious.” But laughing about it was as far as we got.

This is because by that time, I was vomiting up emotions I’d been keeping hidden for years on end. I was not very lovable at this point, which is why memories of Dana are so precious to me. Even when I was at my worst, she tried so hard. Because our relationship heated up to a physical fight, I knew I could never in a million years go back. But I don’t mistake the part for the whole, either.

During that time in my life, I was screwed up with love. It was coming at me from two directions, hers and the woman who gave me back to myself. Because I was close to both of them, I felt the pull between them all of the time, because I wanted to give them both everything in the world and it was hard to navigate.

I fell in love with honesty on both sides. It’s just that PK girl wasn’t gay and it quickly turned into a clusterfuck. In what world would I not fall for a white knight who loved me to the very best of her ability, even when I was completely unlovable? Love for her didn’t come out of nowhere. At that point, I hadn’t even really seen many pictures of her, so I knew at that point that I would take the whole package, sight unseen.

I had a keen awareness that it was never going to happen, but that didn’t stop those feelings from coming. I never wanted to act in a way that would alienate anyone, but I lost who I was and did, anyway… in a pattern that should seem familiar by now. I was tasked with turning off that trauma reflex, that I would live with unrequited love forever.

Putting on my big girl pants and acknowledging it was the height of my stupidity, but in retrospect I didn’t need her response. I could have gone a lifetime without knowing what would have happened. It was way more about me, and how I wanted to be different than the woman who abused me. To say open and honestly I have these feelings and I don’t know what to do with them, rather than roping her into a game she didn’t want to play. I asked for patience from her and Dana, and I got it up and to a point.

Dana’s patience with me ran out, and in some sense, I applaud her for that. Letting me deal with my shit on my own was the right answer. I wish that our relationship hadn’t ended the way it did, because I am back to my old self and have been for years. I wish she could see who I am now instead of who I was then, lost and confused.

“Lost and confused” had its limits, though. I was never jealous of the men in PK girl’s life. I wanted her to be all of her, and me to be all of me. Then I stepped over the line and our relationship crashed and burned…. but not entirely. It just became a shadow of itself, when I wanted there to be a time when I was her white knight as well.

The only thing I could do was close the door on both relationships, because at that point, there was no going back. It was just moving forward, acknowledging that I’d been an asshole but that I wasn’t one. That it was my behavior in the moment, not the sum total of who I was.

The reason the second relationship was so painful is that PK girl saw it, too, that it wasn’t the sum total of my being. That she wouldn’t hold me to my worst mistake….. sometimes. At others, her anger showed toward me in full force because she would skip over all the parts where I showed her I loved her the way she loved me, and go for the jugular.

I had to stop that pattern as well, because I tried to let her know how I felt so we could move past all that, and it was not well-received.

I chose to focus on the family member who knew everything PK girl did, but could hear things like “I think this could become trouble. What do you want to do about it?” And maybe it’s just that my tone of voice seems so different with Bryn and not my actual words, because I don’t think I’ve consciously been a different person with anyone. I’m just me.

So now we’re the lockboxes for each other and it feels right, because we both struggle with the same “stuff” left over from childhood. It’s just that I can’t tell her story for her and she’s a tremendous writer.

But make no mistake. She knows what you did. 😛

…..and the tape has stopped recording.

Audio for Untitled Entry

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Listen to Audio for Untitled Entry by Leslie D. Lanagan on #SoundCloud https://on.soundcloud.com/dPurY

It’s not any wonder why I’m a blogger. I prefer a world of two. I am one. You are the other. I run to you, my clubhouse. I feel safe here in this sandbox, because I built it. It is the finest construction, and will last eons because it’s digital. You can’t wear it out by rereading, and for better or for worse, it defines me.

I know so many people who love my blog and don’t want to talk to me for love or money, but it’s okay. How I feel? That’s none of their business, and their need to read is none of mine. I know I’m at least interesting enough to have made a highly respected doctor cry on the toilet. This level of fame is overwhelming, and I mean it. Words are powerful, and I can hit things in people both out of idiocy and purpose. Sometimes, I’m trying to elicit a reaction because I want you to feel what I was feeling while I was writing, or remembering.

Other times, my experiences are blending with yours and you’re bleeding out emotionally over something that has nothing to do with me.

For every bit as terrible as my emotional abuse as a child was, that disturbance brought me to a great place now, especially processing those experiences so that I could create new, healthy relationships later.

I have a relationship with a woman that resembles the one I would have had with my mother and my abuser had that love been pure and clean, the “rainbow mom.” Having the role of mother returned to just one person has been magnificent. It’s the first time in my life it’s ever happened. While my mother was alive, we did our best and she died. We lost our future. I have a lot of life left in which a mother’s love would be helpful, and she just shows up like a wolverine when I’m feeling the most vulnerable. It has provided a lens through which I see Cora.

I have a daughter adopted through the rainbow flag that’s giving me the ability to have clean, white, pure mother love flow through me, to give my child the love I should have gotten. And thankfully, I never have to worry about recreating that feeling of ickiness in her, that I was going to be telling her things too big for her age, because we met when she was 24 and I was 45. I didn’t have to work through what it would be like to actually relate to a child under 18 as “daughter.” I didn’t have to worry that I was setting up a bad pattern, that I was loving someone exactly the way they needed to be loved at the moment they needed it.

Mama Wolverine turned me into one, too, and not that I wouldn’t have gotten there on my own. It is that we are of the same mind regarding children, including us. Burn the world down to protect them. My relationship strengthened what was already in me, tempered it and made it shine.

Between having and being a Mama Wolverine, I don’t make a lot of time for other people. I like being a diarist, expressing myself the way I talk in my head, and not the voice I’ve curated over decades. I’m changing that now by recording my entries, but that’s because I realized that it was not really a bigger platform, just a convenience, especially for the seeing impaired, but not especially for them, because my friend Bryn said that she wished she could listen to me like a podcast.

It’s important that it’s not an actual podcast, unless Bryn (or another creator, hit me up) wants to do one. It’s important that I am writing my entries all the way out to the end, hearing them the way I’m supposed to hear before I put it out in the world. Because once it’s in my voice, it’s filtered through something. It’s vulnerability on a different scale, because on the one hand, my voice is a mask.

On the other, my voice gives emotions you might not have thought were there to words I didn’t want you to know contain them. Wondering if you can tell when Mama Wolverine and Cora and I haven’t talked in a while, or that Daniel is troubling me and not because we’re interacting, it’s just a hard situation to love a kid so much and to love her dad twice over.

I wonder if you can tell all that from one free .mp3.

My fates are not entwined with father and child unless we want them that way. Cora wants to be my kid whether Daniel is my husband or not, and it is a gift I never knew I needed. I needed someone in my life to love with such a fierce permanence it couldn’t be duplicated and to have it be an age gap where I was definitely “the parent.” I think I’ve learned enough to be trusted as a listener, and to know when I’m above my pay grade. My teenage years don’t feel like one large wound anymore. I get to take what I wished had happened in that relationship, everything that was good and right and helpful, and only pass on that much of it.

Everything else can be forgotten. Everything that made me feel too young, too helpless, too fragile, too shellshocked and broken…. all of it forgotten in favor of just remembering what it was like to have a person outside my family I could talk to that would act as a sounding board. Period. End of story.

It’s a little bit complicated when Daniel and I are together because I don’t want to tell Cora things that make her feel like anything she and I talked about has the power to end my relationship with him. It doesn’t matter to me that she’s an adult. The power dynamic is the same.

Being there for each other while someone we both love is in rehab is a very good thing, and I have so much love to give that exactly none of it has to do with Daniel. Cora can talk to me about whatever she wants, and it’s all right and good. Everything she says has so much value.

I wish I could do more financially and physically, but it has to be the thought that counts. You want to give things to your kids you didn’t have, right? So of course I want to do whatever it takes to make her feel safe as a 24 year old trans woman, pre-hormones and surgery. That kind of safety is expensive. It would at the very least require getting her into a more liberal part of Texas, when the best thing is to go to a blue state until Texas has better laws for her…. and I’m not holding my breath on that particular topic.

Too many Texans are hung up on having to change, especially the white men who’ve never had to change this much at once and it’s so hard, especially because you’ll be lucky if they give you credit for the fact that sure, their lives are hard, but they’d still rather be them than you.

If I have white hot anger at Daniel left, it’s over this very thing… not understanding that his pain and confusion at his daughter being trans was nothing compared to actually being trans. That his anger and hostility toward me for pointing out his homophobic and transphobic speech patterns is nothing compared to the pain I’ve felt over actually being queer since I was born.

My concern for “how hard all this is” for Daniel is approaching petty level 3000. It is an almost automatic reaction at this point for me to roll my eyes at cis straight white male pain. The fact that I’m even willing to try says more than I’ll ever write down.

Daniel gets to me in particular because he’s so masterful at using his writer personality to say that he doesn’t give a fuck how it feels to be me, I should have kept my mouth shut because he was in pain… and to have it make sense, so that I constantly berate myself into thinking that I could have been a better partner by saying a lot less… and not knowing how to explain that in this case, both things are important. If you can’t love me while I love you, no deal.

He couldn’t, and I’m glad to be rid of that temperature in my life. If I’m going to be with a man, it’s not going to be one that can’t admit when he’s being an entitled dickhead. Felt so beat up by a few days of me saying that things were not okay that he broke up with me permanently. So, here is what I know. Daniel can be mad all he wants that I called him on his shit, AND he’ll never be strong enough in a million years to actually be me.

He wanted to be able to act like a complete asshole with complete immunity from consequences, because he was sick and we weren’t. No, Daniel, love of my life. You do not get a pass because the things you say affect our mental health. In effect, the things you say are making us sicker because you’re hitting the same nerve that a thousand other homophobes have hit before you.

We are allowed to care about that. We should not have to wait until you get out of rehab to say that you have triggered either one of us in this manner.

And at this point, I’m starting to wonder whether this was Daniel’s master plan all along. That he could make up this wife and child fantasy with me and Cora, and then when it became inconvenient, he’d just get rid of it… or the part he could, anyway. For him, I was easily disposable, and I believe that even if it was hard. He couldn’t throw away Cora, couldn’t take out any of his anger on her, couldn’t emote in front of her without feeling fear.

So if my only role was to make Daniel mad enough to be a good father, then my work here is done. I don’t know what I want in terms of a partner, but I do know that Daniel isn’t capable. He’s out of the running, possibly permanently. He has a fight on his hands in terms of getting back to himself, because the man he is to me right now is weak-minded. Instead of being an adult and using his words, he pulled out Fox News language. That I was trying to “reprogram” him. That I was part of the “woke mob.” If that’s how he needs to think of me to get himself well, then by all means, bud. Go for it. I still get to be angry that you aren’t smarter than that.

And here is another reason I’m a blogger. I want to tell people what I think of them, often long after they’ve left my life for good. I don’t broadcast what I think. It’s just here if they’re ever curious.

I absolutely want him to know what I was thinking during this time, and that yes, I really was this angry and irate. You turned from Daniel, the thinker/writer boy into Daniel, former military from NE Texas and every stereotype that entails. Our story was worth more than that, and you made it on the cheap. Turned an arthouse flick into a segment on Fox news…. because there’s not enough content for a movie.

Never forget Aaron Sorkin’s warning about soundbites. “What are the next ten words?”

When I find them, I’ll blog them.

Strength and Helsinki

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The Big Yellow House, Part Two: Prologue

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

In part one, we explored the first people I met when I came to Oregon and told their story. We started at The Little Grey House and ended at The Church That Used to Have Green Carpet. There is a prologue to The Little Grey House that starts in The Austin Stone Cathedral, and predates The Big Yellow House by about 12 years. If you think I don’t know what I’m risking with this subject matter, I’ve already talked it out. The people in the story outside the real issue would never know or even remember everything that happened in those 12 years, because only Bryn is close enough to me to have watched me since 1997, and there are a couple of people who remember from 1990, but I would never trust them and talk about it. The conversation would mostly consist of tears and guilt because I knew they were right and I didn’t care. The big secret of childhood abuse is that we crave it. We hate ourselves because abuse makes us feel so good (physically) until the lovebombing stops. With a narcissist, it generally comes pretty quickly after they realize they can control you easily and well.

In 1997, Bryn’s big brother Matthew was 16 (which I only remember because I was impressed he could drive… I was terrible at it and still am), Bryn must have been in the neighborhood of 14, which would have made younger sister Christy about 11? 12? I don’t remember the kids’ ages in score order, but I do remember each and every way they’ve enriched my life… and every sin I committed out of idiocy or malice or both.

In retrospect, the dark and the light combine into an amazing tapestry, because we were all loved by their parents. The fact that I wasn’t actually born to them is something that none of us have ever noticed, although I did date Matthew for a few months and that was confusing for all of us. Mostly because it was the first time I’d ever been attracted enough to want to date a boy as an adult. However, I will tell you that my experience with having a 7th and 8th grade boyfriend prepared me for some of it. This is only to say that at the time, bisexuality was not as understood by straights who are not okay and queers who aren’t doing any better. If you’re bi, you get it from all sides. No wonder I chose one too early. The two women I’ve mentioned previously took care of my magical thinking on that one. Once you’ve had sex with women, there’s no going back. It changes you. The way the abuse hurt still is that Alpha abuser thought it was a cute quirk and not real. She blabbed to all her friends about me when I wasn’t sure I wanted anything known about me. She knew this. I know she did. She just didn’t think. Now those friends have participated in my sex life as well, because they thought it was funny.

It was about March of 2003 or 4 (I’ve slept since then) that I had a pregnancy scare. It was devastating and exciting, but only a scare because I had no idea where I was in my cycle and whether it was even a real thing. I took a pill anyway, just to be safe. However, the reason I took the pill is that I didn’t want there to be any chance of me being a single mom. I asked Matt to be the boyfriend, and he turned me down, but very sweetly. He said that he didn’t think he was capable of being the boyfriend. I went on to meet someone else and so did he. It was not an ending, but a blessing and releasing.

Also, men are terrible. 😉

Luckily, I never had any of those hang-ups, because men relate to me in a different way. I’m sure that will change if I become another man’s wife, because me being married to a woman shut down their defenses. Most of my male friends are tenderheart bears who would die rather than show it. I know things about them that their wives never will, and it’s because friendship deserves secrecy. I treat all conversations as confessionals so it’s not weird for them to say they hate being married or WTF ever. The things you say to your friends to handle being married… The things you say to a woman who loves you but is not in love with you… The things I say to remind them of that fact. You’re not done, you’re just frustrated. Here’s how I fixed that issue in my own marriage. See if it works for you. No refunds.

Sometimes I’m wrong. Sometimes it’s “we’ve been talking more in the last two days than we have in the last two years.” After being married for almost eight years, there’s virtually no problem I haven’t dealt with (whether it’s good or bad). I also have excellent recall of those years, so anyone who comes to me and asks for my opinion will get one already fully formed.

The most consistent problem across sexual orientation and gender is communication. Mostly “they don’t treat me the same at home as they do in public.” We’re all guilty of curating our marriages, but it’s dangerous to do that too much.

I have lived in too many fantasies to think that’s untrue. I have loved the curated versions of several people, none more than the first and the last. The first created a Beautiful Memory Picture. The second one took the picture and destroyed it right in front of my eyes. What she did differently is not allow me to live in that bubble. To date, she is the best interrupter of my life. It sounds like a dig, but she uses my ADHD like a superpower. She knows I’m listening, and to turn my attention to something else is a blessing. Just like with everyone else, sometimes I do focus on her minutiae. But it’s not because I’m in love with her. It’s just because I love her. Alpha pretended, and the fantasy lasted as long for her as it did for me.

Here are two differences between real vs. pretend:

  1. Alpha presented as having feelings. She does not. She knows how to imitate feelings. Omega started with a truthbomb and has never wavered because of them. Her behavior and her words match. I have a PowerPoint presentation complete with annotated bibliography (my diaries and letters of the time, all gone now but the words are still in my mind) on how to love both of them. What I did not know was that Alpha was going to destroy me and Omega is still destroying me. One put in flashbacks and triggers. One is taking them out and looking at them with me, setting fires with a blowtorch and gasoline so that I can function again.
  2. Alpha’s friendship started with Schrodinger’s Seduction. I can get her to do whatever I want if I install the trigger that I’m the only one that can meet her needs. That my parents were sus. Omega’s friendship was never dependent on that because she’s not looking for it. Her clinical separation with the way I could fall for Alpha (I thought it was real due to context clues and not her actual words). We were both musicians, both singers, kindred spirits. The problem was that she blamed me for years over a trigger she installed. Omega will have her ass for it if she ever meets her.

It’s good to know a dragon in human form, especially when she lets me hold onto her tail. My hand fits firmly in her claws, which she uses to massage my head when I’m sad or angry. It helps, even in fiction. My ride or die is a muscle mass of fury, and I need it. Her “lead the charge into hell” attitude has saved me from so much trauma because I listen to her and parrot her opinions on a number of subjects, most of them about me.

We are both better people than we think we are. We both tend to give an enormous amount of love without receiving it, even though it is given freely. As I mentioned, if I pick up her coffee, she’ll turn around and do it for me. When it’s something special, she’ll buy me a book she loved and wants to share. She really listens, and picks winners. Everything from Stanley Tucci to Deborah Harkness to Karin Slaughter. We also talk other media, and she’s only given one recommendation that I liked and didn’t love. I was in a bad place when I saw it, and it scared me. I just couldn’t tell her why.

I’d started hanging out at the Spy Museum, practically living there when I had a membership because I was so dedicated to studying the world of intelligence. I am less interested in writing a novel about spies and being able to use that library of images correctly. As a result, I met regular people who used to be spies. The “regular people” put me through the ringer in terms of thinking about what it might be like to actually live that life. I’d love the travel and the worldview. I think if you’re CIA you become a citizen of the world… because maybe your job is at Langley, and maybe it’s in Kandahar with terrorists or drug runners at the Texas border. CIA charter says that they only work overseas, that anything happening is the United States is FBI. The crossover comes in with things like 9/11, where enemy combatants from other countries were arriving here.

My clinical separation was non-existent at that point. I was thinking about these friends being in danger, and the show she recommended was basically as close to a procedural as you’ll get from any US Intelligence Agency. It was called “The Enemy Within.” It didn’t deserve to get canceled, because it was brilliant. I will probably borrow structure from it at some point.

What wasn’t brilliant was all of the actors appearing as my friends if I picked up that telescope. I was zooming in on the feeling that being a spy is not all it’s cracked up to be. You have to lie a lot by necessity, and you have to worry about your personal and professional lives colliding in a very, very bad way. It is not for the faint of heart, and I could have done it given my experience with Alpha. If I was in operations though, I don’t think I would have stayed long. Living that way over time wears you down. I think I would have been very happy as a Feeb, and might check on their psychological requirements. Here’s why. What bothers me the most about military and intelligence is that there’s a very real chance they’re going to die. Most of the time, with intelligence the chances are a million to one. Sometimes they’re not. If you’re in the Armed Services, the percentage of death jumps by a large margin. Spies are able to live in the shadows, but are sometimes also forward deployed. And then you have DIA, which is basically CIA except you’re in the military. And that’s where I think about dying far away from home, like Daniel almost did… and an unlikely hero of mine, Harry Windsor. It was alarming how much I freaked out when I realized that the prince was in Kandahar at the exact same time as Daniel. Both of them could have died because of a terrorist.

I could have been there because I had to cut off my emotions to survive abuse. I could have been a spy because my reality cracked in childhood. I would have been very good. It makes me feel like a monster that I know how to get what I want from nearly anyone as long as I ask it the right way, and I am well practiced in making an ask………………………..

Two things about that. I don’t want a compartmentalized life, even if it comes with trips to amazing places. I also don’t want to be cut off from my emotions, because thinking about all my secrets and lies would undo me pretty quickly.

In short, I want to forget about Alpha, because imitating the way she makes every relationship transactional and tells you she loves you every single day without being willing to do even the smallest thing is toxic. I would not want to be that person, and yet I do have those tendencies. It’s why I work so hard on my relationship with Omega. I need a friendship that is rock solid and real. That if I fall, I will hit the ground. Nothing is bottomless or worth despair over when it was. That’s because Lindsay (younger sister) doesn’t even remember what she looks like. Why should I remember all this? It’s inspiring that I may get there one day.

I would still apologize and regret if I hadn’t figured out that the relationship was a fantasy on both our parts. The story I was telling myself is that I mattered to her. The story she was telling herself is that she was the perfect mothermentorsisterfriend and I was just bipolar and acting out. She used my diagnosis effectively in the destruction of our relationship, and I won’t forget that, either. I thought she was being abused, I wasn’t crazy. I thought she’d signed up for a lifetime of being railroaded into the ground, because patterns don’t come from nowhere. She has convinced a lot of people that she’s been amazing to me, probably hoping to make me look like an ungrateful spoiled brat because she’s “given me so much.”

She loved me when it was convenient for her (read: when she needed something from me; transactional). Her other friends were blind to this fact, and she thought nothing of telling me that she’d made one friend her “pet person.”

Gross.

I’m not trying to tell her story at all. I am saying that in that moment, I figured out what was being done to me, what had been done starting a few months before I turned 13. I don’t think she ever did something like this to other young girls, but I’ve seen the pattern play out with more women than I can count. The one woman before me who was brave enough to call her on it also got dumped as the friend because obviously she was crazy. If you talk to Alpha, she has never done anything wrong in the history of either relationship, and if she has said the opposite, she said it because you had something she wanted.

If her dopamine levels are low, she’ll get a hit any way she can… and in my case, it was reaching out for adoration because she knew I’d never say anything negative. Then, I got mad. So I was discarded for telling the truth and now some of my former friends think that I am mentally ill. It’s true, but not about this. Some of those triggers helped to set up my valley of vulnerability, but no one remembers that, either.

Her reality cracked, and then mine because of it.

In this case, correlation provides all of its causation, but no one looks at it except me in any regular sense. Everyone else has moved on, because she has. Here’s the thing, though. As fake as she was, she also never would have left me. If there is someone on earth that she genuinely loves, it’s me. This is because life hadn’t hit her too hard when we met. I slid in under the wire and disarmed the bomb. My ire is directed at how love was presented. Being seductive while she told me we were family and then treating me like she didn’t know what the hell was happening “must have been confusing and upsetting to you.”

Must have been? No. I deal with all this every day. Every time I talk. Every time I sigh, every time I am looking in the mirror and one of her facial expressions appears. That is the one true fact that I know people can remember. My impersonation is dead accurate.

That’s because I curated it.

Long before we ever went to the The Big Yellow House, love was based on what I could do for her, and not what she could do for me. I would not believe that had I not spent 23 years in the trap.

I said that I was going to borrow structure from Wicked, and that Alpha might not even appear in the series because I wanted to focus on my friends other than her that came to me through the relationship. Then, I realized it was unfair to throw everything out there, only telling one side of the story.

I decided to say explicitly why it was hard, because no one recognized it back then. I was 19, but arrested at 14. Then, when the trauma started resolving, I had to develop coping mechanisms. For me, it’s writing- the lead the charge into hell that Omega exhibits comes in handy when I realize “now is the time I should unleash holy hell because I’m right.” I am being a judgmental bastard right now because here’s what happened.

When I was 36, the relationship ended for good. I was too upset that not only had Alpha done this to me, she had the audacity to tell people that she just didn’t understand why I was so obsessed with her. It’s because she put every single problem we ever had on me, particularly why it was wrong for me to be in love with her because she was an adult and I wasn’t.

…….without ever taking in that I was following her lead, just like in everything else.

The exact reason I went to The Big Yellow House in the first place and even have all these memories. To that I can attribute gratitude. The rest combined malice with idiocy depending on the day. I was sat there listening for days.

It’s just that for me, there are some core memories that are damaged from certain things that have been said or done. For me, it was one of the worst days of my life. For her, it was Wednesday.

The Woke Mob and How to Join

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Be queer and concerned about someone trans, apparently.

Also, when someone says “don’t call me a drunk,” the right answer is not “but you are a drunk, Daniel.” Probably not my finest moment, but I didn’t think about it because the friends I have who are drunks have been sober a long time…. Which made me sound like I was an expert punching down at 101 over there, but it just didn’t register.

Once he’s admitted he’s an alcoholic every day until May, then at 30 meetings in 30 days, and then every meeting for the rest of his life, maybe he’ll have some compassion for why saying “you are a drunk” didn’t phase me, but probably should have because I didn’t realize I was dealing with an AA newborn. I have done that, I have been the newborn while my friend was getting treatment, but we were learning together so that I could support her and be knowledgeable while doing so…… I’m more like the convert who’s mad there’s not a group for people who don’t have addictions and yet still can’t get their shit together.

At least, that’s what I thought until I remembered there was such a group for people like me.

To say that I have been to a few more AA meetings than he has is correct. However, I’m just a normie who goes to open meetings to support her friends. I’ve never actually been through addiction as a patient. Just as one of the people they delightfully injure until they realize they are doing it…. and let’s get real, some never do. I just have to lick my wounds with Tall. Mustache. Fishing Hat. There’s got to be a DC version somewhere. There’s a version in every AA and Al-Anon meeting in the country.

I cut The War Daniel off after he went vitriolic and broke up with me. Again, I didn’t break up with me, he did… It’s not that I don’t want to reconnect later. He just needs to sit his ass down for a while. Maybe he’ll change his mind when he realizes that I am not a threat, and neither is the “woke mob” mentality that’s been served to him in NE Texas and not its actual definition. He was fine and wanted to learn everything about everything until five minutes before “Son Of’a Bitch, Everything’s Real.” He is somewhere between it and DENIAL (Don’t Even kNow I Am Lying).

Daniel has no idea what I’m doing because he has been blocked on Facebook, and I have no idea about him. I didn’t do it to avoid him. I did it to avoid making things worse. He says it’s over. I say “you’re in rehab.” I do not believe that you can make a decision like whether you want to get married, travel the world, or even get a major haircut without letting your brain clear out from that. So, I’m giving him until January next and say “you can always come home again.” He can, but if he has no interest, I can’t help that. In fact, I am helpless here. He means too much to me to turn back now. It would be a loss like I’ve never felt before, and have already been mourning because I don’t know whether it’s real.

I just don’t think it’s possible to go from wanting to marry someone one day and wanting to break up with them the next unless your nerves are so fried that you can’t handle anything of substance. Despite it, we are in a large argument right now that will not resolve because neither of us will give an inch because we’re both right. I just happen to think I’m a little more right than he is.

He is correct in thinking that rehab is a big deal. He is incorrect in saying homophobic shit repeatedly and getting called on it repeatedly because he does it repeatedly.
Now we’ve gone from the proverbial “baby, I’ll try” to “you fuckers don’t even tell us the rules.”

We did.

You just threw a bitch fit about it.

Daniel’s point, and I get it, is that he’s a white, cis, straight male who’s about to enter rehab and he can’t handle all this. He’s correct about the rehab patient thing. If he pretends to be a white oppressed male one minute longer than he needs to get well, my boot will leave tracks on his ass. He needs me to back off. I can roll with it when it’s just me. I’ve been taking shit like that my whole life, starting when I was 10. It’s not that people do things on purpose. They do things that they’ve never been taught are wrong and then don’t remember. Then, they’re offensive all over again and I have to endure that pain another time. If you don’t catch it when it happens, then you’re really screwed. There’s even less chance that someone will remember what you said if you ask them to recall something. There is no way I could put Daniel through any of that unless I was punching down.

Punching down is a relatively easy concept, but I can’t explain it in English. We don’t have two verbs to tell people about yourself. In Spanish, there are two. “Ser” is “to be.” It’s for things that cannot be changed, like being black or trans. The other verb that also means “to be” is “estar.” Estar is for a transitory state, like hungry or crying.

“Estoy cansada” is correct. I am tired. When I wake up after a nap, I won’t be tired anymore. Daniel might not have thought this in reality, but he handled my situation as if being queer was a transitory state. That I could give up being so angry. The problem was that I wasn’t agnry. I was annoyed. Again, nothing new. Just hard to keep it under wraps all the time because Daniel isn’t even the millionth customer. That had to be ten years ago. I am not angry. I am exhausted, and there is a world of difference. What I have learned so far is that I will bend, but I will not break.

Here’s the line in the sand, and it’s easy to draw it because I’ve left as much room for him in my life as he deserves…. a chance to redeem himself. Rehab grace only lasts so long before Sweetpea begs to be let off leash. She sent me a picture of herself the other day. She doesn’t play video games at all……. and the picture of her was *Alduin* (incidentally, she doesn’t know it, but I am very much like Paarthurnax).

Like I said, I can take it when it comes to me. It’s just that he has a trans daughter. So, he does twice the irritating shit that he used to and is even more angry that he has to adjust. Apparently rehab is also going to fix homophobia, transphobia, and aggressions toward both. He sees me as the enemy now, when all I’ve tried to convey is the normal amount of “hey, that hurts.”

When Daniel and I first started talking, I thought he was fine. He wasn’t. The medication he was taking to control his cravings, plus the one beer he was drinking a day to make sure he didn’t accidentally commit suicide kept him stable.

So, I was on board. I’ve been down the rabbit hole of addiction with friends several times before, and my ex-wife got a DUI years ago, so not only did I learn about addiction and the brain, I also drove my wife around for three months until she got her license back. This was torture for two reasons. The first is that I hate driving. The second is that I hated Dana more than usual when I was driving. I’ll just let your mind wander on that one.

We’d spent a lot of time talking about the TV show MASH, because Daniel was a Navy hospital corpsman embedded with a team of Marines in Kandahar during Operation Enduring Freedom. His stories are just humbling, and always make me cry… just thinking about the sheer number of times I’ve almost lost him is enormous. Thinking about his service record is intimidating. Sometimes I think “why would somebody like him love somebody like me?” I’m not being down on myself. It’s just that you have to dig under the war hero stuff to make it make sense. He’s a writer. You can tell that clearly.

My work in progress is set in Viet Nam. Obviously, I have friends who are soldiers to help me with patois, but it would be nice to have a coauthor on the project who actually knew what he was doing with that kind of dialogue. The most frustrating thing about being married to a Marine’s daughter was all of the acronyms. No one can penetrate all that without private lessons, and no one gave them to me.

They were very content to let me go on not understanding their conversations. Dana and I were together almost eight years. In all that time, I have learned that a PX is like a Wal-Mart. I am sure that I could do better if I dug deep, but tax free means something. Maybe not for candy and sodas, but you can get things like TVs and gaming consoles. Again, not free. But a major discount. Anything else I picked up was from context clues, and here is a big one.

Flying standby.

My guess is that even Daniel hasn’t thought of this in his “you fuckers” haze, but he can show up at any base in the entire world and fly standby to anywhere else. If Cora and I are invited, we can go with him. We cannot go unaccompanied anywhere, but that really doesn’t matter. I don’t want to go anywhere without him.

I was starting to be glad that Sam was a hit and run, because I saw so much potential here. We planned all kinds of trips, from Helsinki to Cairo to Phnom Penh and back to wherever we’ve chosen as home. As I was telling Cora, “I’m fine with living overseas or staying in this area. It’s just that we can’t live in Texas anymore.” She’s trans, and they’re losing out on nearly every right imaginable in the State Leg. I will probably go to a Molly Ivins level of batshit crazy if I think about it too long, so let’s move on.
Daniel thinks that I wake up every day to wrestle the devil du jour, and while it’s an interesting phrase, it’s bullshit ALL DAY. He’s not the devil, and I’m not the “woke mafia” of legend. I’m trying to keep him from doing irreparable damage to our relationship, and more importantly, the one between him and his daughter. I do not want to be the cause of Daniel losing his daughter, and if he keeps it up, that’s what’s likely going to happen. Cora is going to be just as angry as I was, and it will not go well for Daniel.

But I cannot tell him that. I have told him. He has heard me. He is too overloaded to change right now. I have to be brave and hope that he’s willing to change later. I cannot hope that he cares enough to make amends, but I can hope that when his brain chemicals are level, he realizes that he betrayed his daughter and the woman he wanted to marry by saying that he already had new friends now that accepted him for exactly who he was.

Life is not black and white. There’s so much gray area here, because normally I wouldn’t put up with any of this. It’s that he doesn’t live in the world of awake yet. Alcoholism was keeping his night terrors at bay. Sobriety has made them rise from their graves. That is conjecture, but it has happened to my other AA friends.

I also think that I have been too flippant because I have so many AA friends that it didn’t occur to me that Daniel had never been. I’m sure it was annoying because I was talking like he’d been in the program for years and it was like, five days.

But the point still stands.

At this moment, Daniel does believe that he has hurt both me and Cora. He just doesn’t register our pain as valid. His is much more important than ours whether we think so or not.

It’s why I’m trying to be so kind and loving, and have my anger moments, but let them go. I wouldn’t even have posted anything about this except that Daniel is being stubborn and not talking to me at all. It was time to prepare for the end of the relationship on Stories after I’d had time to process it on my own. In fact, I’ve been processing so much that the only thing I can come up with is just to let it lie. Don’t respond, don’t talk, don’t breathe where Daniel is concerned. He’s got too much on his plate to worry about me, which was his point originally (even if the execution left A LOT to be desired).

He also knows that the reason this is a big fight is that he didn’t just offend me. I am not the only queer person in his life, and not only did I jump in for myself, I interrupted years and years of family-entrenched behaviors.

As the interrupter, I became the enemy.

I’m used to it. I’ve only had one relationship where I really got along with my girlfriend’s parents, and that was Kat’s. I don’t think they ever believed Kat was bi to begin with, and I have to say that I should have agreed with them. It would have explained so much. However, I would not have met Dana, and Dana opened a door for me that taught me how to think in a different way.

I just feel as if I shouldn’t emotionally bleed out over this, because he doesn’t deserve it. He would if we’d been together long, but we weren’t. The difference between me and him and everyone else is that I’ll wait for him.

I bet that seems surprising.

Too much other shit going on to explain everything in a way that wouldn’t “out” other people, so I won’t. All I have to say about the whole situation is “thank God for grace.” I know I am capable of it, I hope that The War Daniel is, too.

I know for certain that if he was able to disconnect that quickly, it would have been a horrible relationship. Any time we needed to talk about anything, he’d fold into himself and become a brick wall. I’ve been in that relationship before. I’m tired of it. I want to go back to the lovebombing, because I believe that’s the person Daniel really is, and the person I’m not talking to is the one who is alcohol-deprived, miserable and lonely as much as he says he has new friends.

If there’s anything I also know about Daniel, it’s that he does want to learn. He won’t be happy staying in a place where everybody is just like him. Where he doesn’t learn anything about how to love a trans woman properly through listening to both of us (trans pain and queer pain are alike and specialized). He doesn’t spend any time with Robin DiAngelo. He doesn’t have to sit through the thousand lectures I’ve heard over my life in order to become this “woke mob” unto my own. If we have an incompatibility, it is this. It’s not that he can’t or won’t learn, it’s that I’m so far ahead of him that he can’t listen to me anymore. He just thinks I’m pedantic, meddling, and the kid was fine til I came along.

I have so much more power than I thought.

That being said, I won’t grieve long. Even if I did everything to the worst of my ability, one fact remains. I got Daniel to rehab in the first place. The reason the relationship could die is not because I don’t think I’ve met the love of my life. I have, and I know it. There will never be another War Daniel in my life, so I hope that this one remembers to check in. It’s that he cannot continue to make me a part of “you fuckers.” I get that he’s angry. I even get why. I don’t think that expecting Daniel to understand that I’m hurting is invalid during treatment. Again, though, I can’t count him out. Rehab is such a tricky thing. You know an alcoholic/addict is sick, but when do you start holding them accountable for all of their words? I am weighing whether I am hurting myself for a goal that will never come.

I don’t think he’s done anything that says I won’t love him.

Yet.

He is The War Daniel, but if I have a character, it is Rory the Roman. It will take as long as it takes, possibly centuries. He doesn’t know what that means, either.

But I’m betting you do.

In Which the Sun Comes Out

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Part One in the “Stories from The Big Yellow House” Series

The yellow house is much yellower now, though in my memory it is not so bright because I’m not there. Neither is anyone else I know, but it was so precious while it existed in my world, and now in my memory. I am glad that The Big Yellow House is so entrenched in my core, because it will never fade.

Because when the Big Yellow House goes, so do my memories of a lot of other people. This entry is for them, and starts with a conversation between Bryn and me regarding our “shared childhood.” Now that we’re older, we both think of each other as children back then. I was 19, so I think that makes her 14 or 15 when we met. She would remember. I can remember everything but her age. 😛

Saying Bryn’s name out loud because she’s one of the, like, three people I would entrust with this conversation at all. Anyone who knew I was talking about it with someone and cared could easily guess all three. That’s because neither of us are the main characters. We were the ones that snuck off to be bad girls.

She wasn’t quite old enough to be bad properly, and I was a computer geek. We just sat and talked, and increasingly listened to jam sessions that were mildly interesting as background music and right now I can think of at least five people who are going to read that sentence and hate my guts. And two who will absolutely fall on the floor laughing and go, “she went there.”

I was never into the banjo. I hated it. Just for the record, but no one asked me… whereas I would say that anyone who learned to play the banjo in The Big Yellow House was clearly trying to isolate me. I am certain that was on purpose (one of the only jokes I will make about my time in The Big Yellow House, because it’s a shame that I can’t. Not right now. Even a decade later, it’s still Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

It’s because I have love for some of the people I met there and still have on my friends list, and some others that are a memory. Still alive, certainly, but with no need or want on either side to reconnect. Actually, that is a lie. I do not know for certain about them. I know for certain about me. I am not willing to do anything to help things along in terms of getting closer. I am reaching out to the people at that house when I was there. I feel that my ramblings might give the impression that I mistook the part for the whole and was trying to say that everything was bad.

This series is a way to say thank you for the things that they gave me while I was also in hell. I haven’t forgotten it, and I don’t want to focus on darkness. I want to bring this into the light, because that’s where they brought me. I cannot regret coming to Portland, because I wouldn’t have wanted a chance to meet Dana and then blown it by not coming back.

I definitely would have met some of these people one time, but they would not have raised me the way that they did. I’m kinder because of them. I’m a better person because of them, even though they knew nothing about me.

For the record, some people believe that I am a liar and I am just crazy. I don’t believe that, but they do. I believe that I can express what I’m feeling better than at least half the world, so my faith in my sanity is fairly sound. However, in my tribe, no one is perfect. It’s just that the more of us there are, the more it’s likely that one of us is all right.

The Big Yellow House will look at my experiences in Portland through the lens of one particular backyard… with two particular young girls… and three particular puppy dogs (Bunce, then Barley, then Maisie in score order). We’ll look at history, both personal and American, interestingly enough. We’ll go to church, where I was basically the youth group (what’s new?). We’ll walk up 36th to Division, then 37th up to Hawthorne so we can go to trivia.

We’ll listen to Outpost at the Block Party. We’ll go to Le Pigeon. We’ll invade the kitchen at Tapalaya and drink at Biddy McGraw’s. But we’ll start with a prayer for ablution. Water is washing over me and my tears are stinging my face. We’ll start with 1997, just a snippet of a memory.

Alex

Alex was one of the first people I met in Oreon, predating the yellow house by quite a few years. She had my heart from day one when there was a party at The Little Gray House, and men were bothering her. She asked if she could be my girlfriend for a second to get them away from her. To know how funny this actually was, you’d have to know Alex and me. She’s a diva, the amazing kind that makes you pray to the voice gods before an audition that you don’t have to follow her.  I’m short and I don’t like many people. Enough said about that except to say that “Odd Couple” moment made me think that maybe I had more than one friend in the neighborhood. Alex and her husband have blessed me many times over just by being them. I have told their story before, and was crying so hard in the middle of a Starbucks that my mother thought we should leave so I could calm down. I think she thought I needed Xanax, when in reality it was the best sermon I’ve ever heard, and I will put it up against anyone, anywhere, because the structure ENDS ME to this day. I am sobbing right now just thinking about it.

At Bridgeport, we divided the service up in to different duties. Instead of always having the pastor du jour (our word for having rotating preachers and an alarmingly deep bench- mostly brilliant lesbian preacher’s kids and ordained pastors kicked out of other churches,tbh… theological academician crack) do what we called “the offering pitch,” different people were asked (generally five minutes before… not planned, but useful because people will rarely say no if you don’t give them a chance to think about it).

Greg, Alex’s husband

I’m sorry. This is going to take a minute to get out because I know this story and you don’t. I cannot breathe all the way down, and this happened such a very long time ago. It’s a core memory that is one of my blue orbs hoping to find yellow and avoid red. My emotions are turning inside out.

I can remember about 10 years ago losing my everloving mind with grief as I relayed this story to my mother, where I wailed and she said we should leave Starbucks.

Greg walked to the front of the church and stood in front of the baptismal font. He pointed and he said, “this is where I was baptized.”

Then, he walked to the altar rail and looked toward the windows facing north, and he said, “And this is where I got married.”

This is the part where I am crying so hard I think my heart is going to break. I haven’t been back here in so long, and it was the most traumatic thing that has ever happened in our community. We will never get over it. We had to learn to live with it, our entire church life beginning back over at the Book of Acts, or as I call it, The Gospel of “Holy Shit, What Do We Do Now?”

Greg turned so he was standing behind the Communion table and he said, “this is where I buried my children.”

It was true. Greg and Alex lost their twins, Eleanor and Quinn, to a rare genetic disorder. They were only about two weeks old. 

We’d bought the layette.

Today I learned that grief makes you cry out louder than you thought you could.

He used the resurrection of the Christ to show us how we resurrected ourselves. That the loss of his and Alex’s twins didn’t go unnoticed because it bonded us. Love poured out for them and back into us.

It was a sermon. And I remember it all. I am absolutely sobbing and it was almost 20 years ago.

The people who visited The Big Yellow House were often more important than its residents.

Over time, the color never faded. It just got brighter, especially with the telling of it. “A little brighter than it used to be” was “it BURNS” by dinner.

I assure you, the people who have also been there share this opinion. In fact, it seemed to shine more every year. As we got older, it got smarter. It remembered our secrets and our lies, told to each other in the dark summer nights filled with beer and conversation. 

I was 19 when I met the church at the opera, 20 when I met the church that used to have green carpeting (and is still known that among my crowd… I’m 45), and 21 when I knew that these people were my life.

By 24, I was driving up I-5 feeling like I’d been punked. This had nothing to do with the Big Yellow House and everything to do with the fact that I’d only visited Oregon in the *summer.*

Stay tuned.

A Little Bit of Everything

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

First, let’s get some business out of the way. My domain name needs to be renewed, and it’s only $18. If you haven’t donated and enjoy this site, please do. If you don’t enjoy this site, donate anyway. I will be allowed to keep feeding your dislike. :P~~~ If every one of my readers dropped a dime in the box, I’d have at least a dollar. I think. Anyway, more than grateful if you can do it, not a problem if you can’t. Just putting the idea out into the universe. Paypal link is on my sidebar.

And now, on with the show.

I got to hold one of my three-week-old “nephews” I’ve adopted through chosen family, and I am not exaggerating when I say that my ovaries exploded. I absolutely cannot imagine having my own child, so it was very nice to borrow one for a few minutes. We sat on the couch as he alternated between sucking his bottle and falling asleep in my lap- the most perfect moment I’ve had in a long time. There is nothing that lifts the grief of my mother’s death better than watching a new baby come alive with personality. For instance, one twin finds it comforting to be swaddled. The other will kick off the blankets immediately. I am grateful that they are fraternal, because as they grow I’ll actually be able to tell them apart. Right now, I have to look very, very closely…. or, at least, I think they’re fraternal. I will have to ask. Right now, they’re so little that they look alike in the way that all babies do.

We had to cut off the water main to the house so we could take out a washing machine. Hopefully, it won’t take that long, because I’m supposed to FaceTime with my father and grandfather later. They really won’t care what I look like, but I do. There’s only so much I can do with my current haircut that doesn’t involve a lot of wax. My hairdresser thinks it looks cute. I’m not convinced. I’d show you a picture, but I really don’t want to. Theoretically, I could fix my hair with bottled water, but it’s in the refrigerator. That is a no dice situation right there.

The weather is beautiful, and I’d like to get outside. I’m having to weigh that against my allergies. I’ve taken Zyrtec, Sudafed PE, and Advil. Therefore, I am now allowed to complain. I know I’ve written about this before, but it’s a thing in my family:

Family Member 1: My ____ hurts.
Family Member 2: Have you taken anything for it?
FM1: No.
FM2: Has it kicked in yet?

I’m sure I’ll feel better a little later, but right now I’m waiting for everything to start working. It can’t happen soon enough. Regardless of whether I decide to take a walk, I have to venture out eventually to get groceries. Even that small time outside is a problem without Zyrtec on board. Spring can really hang me up the most. Once summer rolls around and most of my irritants have burned off, I’ll be fine. Now, everything is starting to bloom, and it’s not deadly, but it is truly annoying.

The only thing to which I’m allergic that will literally send me into systemic urticaria (full body hives/rash) and shortness of breath is sulfa drugs. When I was a kid, I had to spend an entire week in the hospital being pumped full of adrenaline, susprin (basically adrenaline extended release), and steroids. It was so much fun, and I looked attractive. It did save my life, though, so I got that goin’ for me.

Back to you, Bob. Let’s go to the phones.

I watched the president’s entire rant on Fox & Friends, and it was hysterical. He just went histrionic on every topic. Even the anchors looked like deer in headlights. This is because they couldn’t figure out how to get him off the phone. The best part was him going full tilt batshit crazy by saying that he’d made NBC a lot of money, so it wasn’t fair that they were now treating him badly. He also called basically every news organization fake news, for which the anchors at least had the decency to look uncomfortable and awkward.

You know, if every news outlet is “treating you badly,” at what point do you make the realization that you’re the common denominator? With Trump, my guess is never.

The other funny part was when he was ranting and raving over DOJ, and the anchors were all like, “Mr. President, it’s YOUR justice department.”

There was only one point at which I truly got angry. The rest of the time, I was just writing him off like Anderson Cooper, who said that he sounded like a crazy guy on a park bench. The anchors asked if the Republicans had done a bad job of representing the black community, and he said “it was a custom….” Then, he backpedaled and said that Lincoln was a Republican and he did the thing.

I assume he meant freeing the slaves, but he did not give any more details. I honestly believe he couldn’t, great history scholar that he is.

I’m actually starting to feel bad for the Republican party, because even when they try to reign him in, try to get him to keep his damn mouth shut, they fail miserably. If Democrats hate President Trump, I truly believe they hate him less than the people who have to work for him.

The problem with not picking an establishment candidate is that they often have no idea how anything in Washington works, and are dumbfounded once they get there. However, this president is not dumbfounded. He doesn’t know anything, and doesn’t seem to care.

I am mystified by all people like that… both people who think education is elitist, and the people who vote for candidates who believe it, too. I don’t understand not wanting the smartest people in the room to be in charge. If you ask me, and so far, no one has, the biggest problem in American politics is that the skills needed to campaign and the skills needed to be president are at complete odds. For instance, policy wonks like Al Gore and Hillary Clinton would have been great presidents, but they’re just not as capable with “show business.”

And that’s what campaigns have become, starting in 1960 with the first televised debates between Kennedy and Nixon. Now, believe me when I say that this is not a treatise on why Richard Nixon should have been elected that year. It’s just that one of the reasons President Kennedy beat him was that he looked like a movie star while Nixon sweat profusely and had to change shirts during commercials. Leaving politics out of it entirely, people are naturally going to vote for the candidate that’s poised and eloquent over the guy who consistently looks like death warmed over.

Much like I do right now, because I can’t take a shower or fix my hair…. and I’m about to be on camera, too.

Send help.

In Retrospect…

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

I’ve thought a lot about what I wrote yesterday, and having my mother die while I was trying to pull myself out of my own head was the best worst thing that could have happened. I got to see up close what it would have done to my family had I succeeded in my quest to get off the grid. I got to see the turmoil, the tears, & all of the absolute misery. I got to see how long it would have taken them to recover, if at all. Moreover, I wouldn’t wish anything I’ve felt on anyone else. It was learning everything I didn’t know I didn’t know.

There are some things that are impossible to experience until they happen. Thinking doesn’t prepare you for even a quarter of the ups and downs of grief. It doesn’t prepare you for either sleepless nights or, for better or for worse, dreaming. Sometimes I see my mother in her casket. At others, we are having the greatest time ever, in future fantasy or in past remembrance.

The first few days are just shock that strikes one dumb and deaf to the world around you… or perhaps it’s more dumb than deaf, because you can hear things, but you cannot comprehend or respond.

It is a delayed response. Everything you’ve heard builds up over time and you explode with the emotions seething under the anesthesia. Even people who are extraordinarily in touch with their emotions cannot possibly process all of it in the moment. And by “it,” I mean the most comforting things people around you have done, and the most stupid. But you can’t really get angry at people who say and do stupid things, because it’s never out of malice.

Very few people really know what to say, or worse, the people you thought would be there for you because you’re supposedly so close disappear, and the ones you never thought you’d hear from are johnny-on-the-spot. But you can’t get angry at that, either, because people tend to retreat out of fear. It takes bravery to confront the grieving…. to show up and say anything, even if it’s “wrong.”

In my own case, I didn’t really want anyone to say anything. I wanted silence and contact comfort. The behaviors I liked the most were friends simply saying, I’m sorry, and then just sitting there with me, an arm around my shoulder, and it being ok when companionable silence replaced conversation.

Everything about the situation was something I couldn’t explain, though through blogging, I tried. I did not have the capacity to reach out to people who would talk back. I only had the ability to write things out into the ether to try and capture how I felt so I could read it later. It didn’t matter to me if it made logical sense; I didn’t care what anyone else thought. Everything I felt about my mother’s death was my own story, and no one could tell it for me. I wrote even when I thought I couldn’t, because I believed in preserving that time in my life for posterity. I put in all of the crying jags, all of the private, angry, “fuck you” moments in my head because I couldn’t stand comments like “she’s in a better place.” Ummmm… I think her better place is with me. I had to bite my tongue through a shit ton of bad theology, and sometimes, still do. It’s also a horrible experience to handle pity. I feel sorry enough for myself without other people drawing attention to it.

I don’t feel sorry for anything in the past, because that’s useless. I feel sorry for everything I won’t get in the future. Actually, I take that back. The one thing I feel sorry about from my past is not being able to say goodbye…. like, what would I have said if I had known it would be our last conversation? Would I have said anything differently? I sort of doubt it. Black humor was never my mom’s thing, and it would have been my natural go-to. Although perhaps it would have become so, because what else can you do about knowing you’re dying but laugh? Sometimes the sadness is just too much. There has to be a release valve somewhere.

For me, that release valve was letting the Mento drop over the Diet Coke here, and for that, I am extremely grateful. Not only do I appreciate my own pensieve, I know this has gone far beyond me, reaching others who’ve lost their own parents. I know for certain that hearing how I navigated grief tapped into the way they did…. and nothing has ever been right or wrong…. just extraordinarily personal.

The one strange thing I’ve noticed in all my ruminations about what getting off the grid would have meant, I have never thought about what it would have been like to lose me. As an introverted writer, I am my own best friend, my own best company. Now I know that I would have lost someone close to me, too. I didn’t put that together until right this moment…. probably because I would have lost my best friend without even knowing it.

I wouldn’t even have thought to say goodbye.

On Death and Dying

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

So, in my last entry, I mentioned my friend Donna Schuurman. What I did not say is that she used to be the Executive Director for The Dougy Center, a place for kids to go when someone close to them dies, such as a parent or sibling. Donna is often called in when tragedies happen all over the world, because grieving children know no national boundaries. But this story is one that has to be told, because she was preaching at Bridgeport UCC when she told it, and I laughed so hard that I thought I was going to asphyxiate. Whenever I feel really, really down about my mother dying, I remember this illustration, and I feel 100% better.

I’m not sure if she still lives in the same house, but when I lived in Portland, her next door neighbor was a five-year-old boy named Jackson. Now, Jackson had a much beloved cat that unfortunately passed away, and his mother was not sure how much, at five, Jackson knew about death. So, she told Jackson that his cat had gone to be with God.

Without missing a beat, Jackson turned to his mother and said………

Wait for it………

What would God want with a dead cat?

Tolstoy Abridged

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

…she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.

-Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

It is funny the lengths to which we will go, the things we will withstand, when we think we need something or someone… most likely someone. Things are an achievable goal. People are moving targets of emotion. In most relationships, but not all, there is some bit of lopsidedness to it. Not everyone finds that marriage, that friendship, that boss in which esteem and respect are equal to one another.

And yet we go on, trying to please and tolerating others’ behaviors as if they are normal in order to learn their particular brand of dysfunction. As Leo Tolstoy says in Anna Karenina, “all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” No family is immune to it- to fit in, we adjust our expectations from the ways we were raised to the way they were… because equality is about compromise, and need is ingratiating ourselves, sublimating the parts of us that are completely different so “we’re on the same page.”

I didn’t learn this from my biological family. I learned it over years and years of emotional abuse. Early and often I changed my behavior so that I didn’t rock the boat, and walked on eggshells, afraid to be myself… because when I was, it was a signal to me that I wasn’t needed anymore. Agreement meant love; disagreement meant “I just don’t know what to do with you. I can’t win, so I’ll just leave.”

Appeasement was the name of the game, and we all do it, but some less than others. Take, for instance, your work phone voice and the voice you use when you’re just shooting the shit with your friends. If “the customer is always right,” sometimes that means swallowing words that need to be said and aren’t… mostly things like “you kiss your mother with that mouth?” Customer service is the only profession I know in which trying not to fake your own death so you don’t have to go to work is a daily struggle…. because people won’t unload on the others they’re mad at, but they have no problem treating the clerk at Target or the waiter at Jaleo like that. They think it’s impersonal, having no idea how deep their words cut… because hey, they’ll never see you again.

And that’s where they’re wrong. They need you. It’s not like they’re going to abandon going to Target or Jaleo, and they’ll see you again whether you want to see them or not. As soon as they walk in the door, you remember their “kick the dog” syndrome and try desperately to find someone else to help them.

But sometimes you’re stuck, and it’s a crapshoot as to whether they’ll remember and apologize.

This same behavior happens in relationships. We’re mad about something else, and unload on the people we love the most, because we know their softest spots. Unsurprisingly, they also retreat, and if the words cut deeply enough, and apology isn’t necessary, because they won’t hear it, anyway.

Because sometimes the emotional abuse is given, rather than received… especially if that’s what’s been modeled for you long enough. Others tiptoe around you, so that you don’t pick up your toys and go home… the exact scenario you were trying to avoid with someone else. You watch as they change their behavior around you, rarely self-aware enough to know they’re doing it, because you’re doing the same thing… your own egocentricity in the way… both saying to each other “please don’t leave me. I am broken and I know it, I just don’t know how to fix it.” Just not with words.

But that’s what happens with fully-functioning adults. As a child and an adult in any kind of relationship, the balance of power is off to an enormous degree… and any perceived anger is all their fault. There is nothing within them that says “this person is treating me unfairly and I need to stand up for myself.” This is because when the child tries to stand up for themselves, it leads to witholding of affection and long, drawn-out silences in which the child takes on the “I have to fix everything” mentality. Instead of another adult compromising themselves into your crazy as you adopt theirs, children cannot begin to comprehend what they’ve done wrong.

And often, this is the root of the problem with adults who also think that every slight is their fault. You don’t get away from it, there’s no relief until you can take back your own power… and it never, ever happens in an instant. It is a lifelong process of examining why you think the way you think, because even when you think you’ve made progress, you’ll fall back into old patterns because they are so ingrained. It is a lifetime of two steps forward, and between one and four steps back. Just like one is never cured of addiction, one is never cured of codependency.

Adulthood modeled badly for children leads to future adults that cannot trust their own intuition, often relying on other people they perceive as just as damaged as they are because they know they can take a healthy person and destroy them. Sometimes it’s a good thing to share experiences, as my friend Donna calls “compatible wounds.” At others, it’s one awful pattern feeding the other with no end in sight, because neither one is aware of just how much they’re doing to excoriate good memories.

The eternal rub, the thing that makes both of you bleed, is that when you’re saying awful words to each other, it’s really just a cover-up as to how you feel about yourself. If you think you’re worthless, that’s how you’ll treat others. You don’t really think that about the other person, you’re expressing your own disgust at yourself, and it comes across as rage and anxiety… words coming out of your mouth before you even have a chance to connect consequences. If someone has treated you that way, why would you? It’s “what you’re supposed to do” in an argument. For two people abused as children, these are fights that are designed to cut both people off at the knees, mutually assured destruction in which both parties have trouble standing back up.

The craziness continues because you’re so afraid of getting “crazy spatter” on healthy people… or at least, the people we view as such… not really taking in that everyone is fighting a battle of some sort. These days, I tend to believe that there are no healthy people, only healthy actions… and, as Elizabeth Gilbert says, “I don’t know of any story of self-enlightenment that doesn’t begin with getting tired of your own bullshit.” I had to decide to get healthy. I had to decide it was time to, in the words of St. Paul to the Corinthians, “put away childish things.” However, just like deciding to come out as GLBT, you don’t do it once… you do it every day. I can’t just decide once. I will die having to make these decisions.

If Need accommodates cruelty, it is a choice to step away from it…. not once, but each and every day. I would amend that statement to say that Need only accommodates cruelty when it is based in lopsided affection, when you think you need something not meant for you. Healthy need is interdependence, not wishing and hoping someone will finally realize what you have to offer… because pro tip… they won’t. Users that make it impossible to please them will only move on to someone else when they realize they can’t get adoration from you anymore. They’ll just lovebomb someone else until they’re so wrapped up in the lovebombing that they can’t understand why it would go away, and what they did to deserve it.

“Putting away childish things” is the realization that you know exactly what you did. You took those childhood behaviors and carried them into adulthood, where they no longer serve you… but again, it’s not a realization that happens once, but every time you interact with others. You have to ask yourself if you are really happy and healthy, or in the company of others, whether everyone is just unhappy in their own way. You have to stand up and say………….

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy. – Ernest Hemingway