Eleven Dollars, Part Two

February 19, 2023 ~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

I have gotten out of the creative groove lately, and I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s that I need to live a little more before I have something to say. Maybe I just need to turn on the faucet and write until I hit something good. I’m sorry for the wandering you are about to endure, but you might be able to take something away from it, at the very least that you’re probably not as mentally, obnoxiously up and down as I have been over the last few months.

I would never tell her this, but Sam broke me. In every way possible, she just ripped out my guts and handed them to me. Again, I don’t have to be mad about that, but it’s still true. She busted my fairy tale in a matter of a few minutes, as if I never meant anything to her. It can’t be true, because she’s going to hear me in her head for years to come. It’s just how I feel, because I don’t need to get together with her to know the things I did to alienate her. I just don’t care. My mother dying has made me stop caring about a whole bunch of stuff. Why someone outright dumped me instead of being willing to be vulnerable is beyond my comprehension and creates apathy. Grief is hard, breaking up is not hard, comparitively speaking.

After that, I just converted to “blink” decisions. I wasn’t having any luck being patient and/or sexy enough to warrant a message back, and I have enough friends that are willing to love me through all this that agreeing to marry Daniel was not a whim. It was a dream. He had it in his head that I already thought he had the perfect life. No, I was talking about the perfect life I wanted to create with him and Cora, our little rainbow family.

That rainbow family has been torn apart because I refused to apologize for having fights over equality with him. His point was that he was punching down, and only he had that right. He was going to rehab, and it was way more important than Cora and I feeling safe in what we hoped to be our home. If he gets it into his head that he can get back to learning about us, it’s a dream I still want. Daniel offered me everything on a silver platter, and because I thought the drugs to control his cravings had him sane, I believed him hook, line, and sinker.

That is why I believe that he wants to break up with me now. He’s living the hard, rock-bottom truth that he’s an alcoholic and no more medication to make that pain go away. It’s blatantly obvious that he’s an aloholic in recovery because of his PTSD, and I have complete sympathy for that. Because he’s furious with me, he’s said that he’s already found a new group of friends that accept him for exactly who he is. Apparently, he is also dating someone else in rehab, which I am almost sure was just a lie for two reasons. The first is that I don’t care. We never agreed to be exclusive during this time and people in rehab get horny faster than the nurses can catch them, but all hell will break loose if they find out. You’re not even supposed to have a relationship at all until you’ve been out of recovery for a year.

The second thing is that he is my primary. It’s not that I ever want to leave him. It’s that if he comes back, he’s it for me, even if I’m dating someone else. I tell people that. Sure, I’ll date you, but I have a primary partner and I will drop you like a hot potato. Your choice.

But the thing is, Daniel would never make me choose monogamy over polyamory because he’s scared that he wouldn’t be enough for me. That I’d eventually meet a woman and leave him. It’s what makes me lean toward polyamory because I can see it so clearly that I don’t want to cause him pain. I also know that you can open a relationship in the beginning, but you can’t do it later.

But the bottom line is that I don’t know what I want. I have to feel all that out. I can see never wanting to let him out of my sight. I feel our bond is too strong to spend a minute without him ever again. But that’s right now, not ten years from now. If it could happen to Dana and me, it could happen again. Our relationship was closed, but I fell in love with my best friend, anyway. It ripped us apart and caused no amount of enmity, because my best friend would rather have a root canal than be romantic with me. She never would have gotten any of my blushing teenage feelings if I’d thought there was a chance of an actual affair. It was frightening to contemplate. It would have wrecked us even faster if I’d actually been tempted, or I wouldn’t, because I would have seen the threat coming and headed it off at the pass. Actually, I tried, but that worked about as well as cutting off my own arm. I was her friend, too. Why did I think it wouldn’t injure her if I said I couldn’t be friends anymore with her because it was threatening to my marriage.

In short, the only reason I’d ever consider polyamory is taking the chance at agreeing to monogamy and failing yet again and having another breakup to sort out. I also don’t want to cheat. It depends on what Daniel wants to do, because I know he only wants me. He just knows how many relationships I’ve had with women and how they’re more intense sometimes than they are with men. I don’t want to lose my whole life over it.

So basically, I’d probably agree to an open relationship and then never actually do anything about it, but I will never say never because stranger things have happened to me that turned out to be wonderful, but it was hard to grow in that direction.

I’ve been dating Zach for a few months now, and Daniel thinks he’s cool as hell. Zach will return the favor when Daniel is ready to be a complete Doc instead of a complete dick. There will be interviews, because Daniel already trusts him and I’m not sending him to somone he doesn’t know (they haven’t met in person, but they will should the stars align). Zac just wants to know that Daniel has the mental and physical capability to be a husband.

Zac can, but he’s not the marrying kind. He is already full up, I think. I’m just one of the people who hangs out with him while we talk about life.

I hope that Daniel can get it together, though, because I want that conversation to happen. I want Zac to see that going through rehab and giving Daniel the chance to get well was the right thing to do. Cora says that my faith in her father is not misplaced. I hope she is right, and at the very least, I’m proud of what it means for their relationship.

The thing about Daniel that hurts me the most is that he wanted to get married right out of rehab, not so we could be together any faster, but to make travel easier, as well as getting me a PTSD Doc with trauma experience and better meds. Saying goodbye to that is a major loss, because I’d never had someone offer me such a big world of “fix-it” than him, and not because I asked. He’s a Doc. He saw I needed it.

Then, later he got angry that I saw him as “having this perfect life.” No, I don’t. I think he’s in the shit. I wanted him to have more to dream of than a dead end job somewhere just to make ends meet. His possibilities are endless, but they are only suggestions. If Daniel wants to move to the beach in a country where we can both live off his retirement, or I could get a job over the Intenet making American money to supplement his retirement, our digital nomad plan has legs.

My basic philosophy on Daniel is that anything he creates now is his choice… from relationships to writing to whatever he wants to do. It’s just that he’s already done his job. He was embedded with Marines in Kandahar during Operation Enduring Freedom. He deserves to do nothing if that’s what he wants. I just think he’s too curious about music, literature, and history to stay bored if he gets that way.

I just want him to know that I do have his best interests at heart. I’m trying to integrate him into a completely queer family, and if you’ve grown up in NE Texas all your life, that is a tall task. He thinks I want to “reprogram him.” No, I want you to take interest in not treating people as if you’re the center of the universe. He can’t help it. He’s an alcoholic. He’s not capable. But it doesn’t make me sorry that I called him out. It makes me human that I’m willing to take all his shit just to hopefully get the reward of a husband and daughter that might never come.

Well, the kid stays in the picture, but you know what I mean.

I can’t picture a life without Cora anymore because I know where she lives. I feel that she is in great danger. I have just as much trauma regarding Cora walking out her front door every day as I do thinking about how crushed I would have been had Daniel not made it home.

Again, it’s NE Texas and there she is sin. So am I. I could also be shot for being trans because I’m genderqueer. I don’t look like a stereotypical woman, so if someone wasn’t paying attention, they’re not going to care if they shoot us both and I would not know how to cope if she died and I lived.

I want her to move to Baltimore with me, because we’ll get a better deal and it’s not too far from Johns Hopkins or the VA. Because of Texas’ inane laws, Cora cannot get the medication or the surgery she needs and she’s 24 years old. If she wants those things, I think it would be completely doable at Johns Hopkins and if the VA does trans medicine, we could also go to Walter Reed, because that would be free to her.

If there are any veterans out there who know if Walter Reed does trans medicine, that would be helpful. Otherwise, it would be cheaper to fly to Thailand first class and get her care there.

I have never met Cora’s mother, but I would like to be friends with her, too, especially if Daniel is uncomfortable visiting her if she’s living with me. I hope he doesn’t. I’m just as much of his friend as I ever was. I am sure that he’s behind his daughter a hundred percent, and I don’t care how he feels about me in terms of getting back together, because obviously Cora’s treatment is not about him.

I think some part of him thinks he’s responsible for all this, because he doesn’t want her to put away her old pictures because he likes reminiscing. He doesn’t want to burn the old birth certificate as a ceremony. He also thinks he’s alone in all this, that millions of parents haven’t gone through the same thing, having a funeral for the child they lost so they can better accept the child they have.

No one raised Cora to be trans, she just is. She’s been wearing a mask since she was born. For her to break out of it, she needs the support of her entire family in lockstep.

I need them to buy the books. I need them to research on the web. I need her parents to see how they’re contributing to her feelings of unworthiness.

I see this more clearly than Daniel because no one raised me to be queer, either. Learning to be a husband and a wife was a time of trial. I don’t know shit from shinola when it comes to finance, important documents, etc. None of my partners have ever been good at this stuff, either, because they were raised the same as me.

That being said, when I’m with men, I tend to treat them like I’m their husbands because no one has ever done it for them before. Treating their minds and their bodies like they are as beautiful as women, letting them open up with anything and everything they want to talk about, letting them be the little boys they were before life hit them in the face.

Men are more tender when you strip away the bullshit of masculinity as an identity. Even the idea of femininity is bullshit, because when I say that I am all female, it doesn’t register that I, too, am an archetype of a woman and I don’t have to wear makeup or clothes to impress to address that fact. I just don’t care that much and want to be comfortable.

I have genderfluid relationships no matter which gender I’m in a relationship with, because I’ve been with women for so damn long that I don’t approach anything with the manners of a stereotypical wife. Therefore, I have no idea how to treat men, so I treat them like women. It works. I still have some of my butch identity that way, and men are forced into a feminine identity that’s always been there, but dormant since they were children. It makes perfect sense. The dance of intimacy is right because we’re both just people, he no more important than me.

It’s something that I want with Daniel, because I think that kind of love will help him heal from his war wounds. I can be his husband if he’ll let me. He’ll get a kind of love that equalizes us so that the power dynamic is gone. He can be submissive with his emotions and his body if he needs to, and it’s ok. It’s why I’m ok with him being in recovery and why I’m ok with waiting a year to see if the breakup was the right move or not. Part of me will never get over it if it’s real.

But one day, I hope he’ll start moving back to me, Eleven Dollars at a time.

The War Daniel in His Own Words

January 17, 2023January 17, 2023 ~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

It happens every time.

Well, not every time. But almost every time. You’re at a gathering of friends and theres always at least one person that finds out you’re ex-military and you can just see the question forming on their lips but a struggle of “do I ask???” And usually they can’t help themselves and ask.

“Did you have to kill anybody.” I sigh, because I fucking hate that question. It was one of the harsh realities I had to struggle with spiritually before I joined, knowing that scenario was going to present itself. You ask yourself day in and out what you think you will do in “that” scenario.

Before you are assigned to a Marine Corps unit as a Corpsman, you go through a 9 week course called Field Medical Training Battalion. It’s essentially a crash course in being a grunt. You familiarize yourself with the M4 and 9mm and 50 cal. You go through what’s called Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain. And it’s not a video game situation. Were armed up with paintball guns, and the instructors play the part of the locals/Taliban.

That’s one of the mindfucks about MOUT. Who is a civilian just trying to make schwarmas, and who wants to kill me? And heres another mind fuck—these mother fuckers don’t play fair. They will use “civilians” as explosive devices.

Especially children.

The kids will come up to the Marines on patrol asking for candy or whatnot but they’re really a lure to get you to drop your guard long enough for them to shoot you from a second story window. Look up then down then up again was the training mantra…. but MOUT was a humbling experience in just how quickly it could all be over. I remember one of my guys getting shot in the leg. I went to pull him behind a wall to kwik clot the wound and I didn’t get down low enough and took a paintball pellet to the neck. If it was real, I just died. I didn’t sleep that night.

So to truly answer your question you have to start back behind the wire.

You could be playing football and grilling hamburgers when your fire team is called to gear up. A fire team is a group of 5-7 that patrol together. It consists of either a Sgt or Corporal that’s the Fire Team leader.

You’ve got a doc, an EOD guy and the rest are gunners. So you’re playing football and talking shit about how Tony Romo would always break your heart and then the next moment you have to go put all your gear on and get ready to go complete a mission. As Doc that sucks even worse because you wear everything the Marines wear plus your med bag.

You’re responsible for making sure your whole fire team has certain things in certain places. Their tourniquet on the top right; kwik Clot in the right cargo pocket. Things like that.

Not knowing when your team is going to be called sucks, but knowing 12 hours ahead of time is worse. All that time waiting around to be under the stress of “is this the last thing Ill ever do?”

Some of my grunts thrived on the anticipation of getting to kill bad guys. That was part of the mission. And they had no moral qualms about it at all. They saw it as a very clearly black/white/them or me, no fuck that these people want to take me from my wife and kids and they can go fuck themselves. So in that aspect, the boys’ conscience is totally clear and the more people they shoot the better. I don’t think that makes us sociopaths. I think it makes us like Dexter [Dexter was a sociopath.]. Vigilante killers of people that need to die, minus the vigilante part.

I am a corpsman, so I am not wired that way. Every time we went out my prayer was 1 that I come back alive, and 2 that I bring everyone back with me, and 3 not to have to use either of my firearms.

On the shittiest day of my life we went out just like any other one. The mission was to go into town and give hep A and b, hep c , smallpox and anthrax vaccinations. My spot in line was last, giving hep a/b.

I don’t even know why there was a lull in the line. I think we had run out of smallpox spears or something, so I was looking around.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw it happening.

Dipshit wasn’t even trying to be subtle. So without thinking, safety goes off; I used my marine’s shoulder to balance my weapon on and I shot the fuck stick through his eye. Then I yelled “FIRE FIRE FIRE” which was the alarm for a bomb. EOD snatched the kid and worked their magic. My first trained response was to look for others because they are human hyenas and not averse to sacrificing one for the sake of the many.

At that point the field ex was terminated and it became about securing the town. No one was hurt, and that’s all I remember of the post action. We all came back across the wire and that was that [also terrifying that you have to feel like you’re in that much danger to feel comfortable in that much danger].

I can’t tangibly measure what my cortisol levels were. I know when I came back I was like “holyfuck holyfuck HOLYFUCK.” And I couldn’t get still. I couldn’t stop shaking.

I cried because now I knew I was capable of taking a life. Commander Baker, our on site Psychiatrist, talked to me for about two hours about innocuous stuff; the first Van Halen album; why the cowboys can’t win in December; why The White album should have only been one album of 14 songs. He gave me some Xanax, ambien and dilauded and sent me to a drug induced sleep. The next day they handed me my down chit, which meant I couldn’t go past the line for 6 days. So all I really had time to do was think.

And one of the things I thought about the most is that regardless of what we think over here, over there, we’re the heels and they’re the babyfaces. They are the heroes of their country trying to rid it of these arrogant westerners that think their culture is so superior to their own. They have families and dogs. And that family and dog hated me. I took someone’s dad, husband, favorite uncle, drinking buddy.

A day doesn’t pass where I don’t think about it at least once. And that’s part of why I drink like I do. Because when I’m sober it comes back to haunt me, and when I’m drunk I can let it go and forgive myself for doing what had to be done……………………………………

Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been here to see The Cubs win their first world series in a century; hear the first new Guns n’ Roses music in 17 years; to get to the point where I played 50 shows a year. And most importantly to be able to see my kid graduate high school, to make the very brave decision to come out as trans; to develop into this fabulous artist, to see my sister realize her dream of having a goat farm; to be able to help my mom through her post cancer recovery.

And to get to marry you.

And now im going to go cry.

Editor’s Note: I have been sitting on this for a while, because I thought I had something to say here. I don’t. It’s perfect on its own. I’m still crying.

Karen

December 29, 2022 ~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

My conversations with Daniel in preparing content are tough shit, and I am so glad that I’m a blogger because of it. When I go all up in my feelings, I have a place to express them without having to think about what he’s going to think when he reads the entry. It’s a mixture of fear and excitement, because if you get PTSD from combat, those are generally the only two emotions in a story.

And then there are things that make me bleed out, like telling Daniel why I have PTSD and Daniel explaining to me why mine was so much worse than his…… Daniel’s enemies were clearly defined. Mine were turncoats, both of them, at a time when I was too little to know that wasn’t okay and took it on as all my fault.

One of the things that’s so different with our two cases of PTSD is that I cannot define triggers before they happen. I’m fine one minute, and inconsolable the next. He actually has enough self awareness to say that he doesn’t like the sound of popping popcorn, because “that’s what M4s sound like when you put them on fully automatic.” He can do something that at this point, I cannot. He can tell me what his triggers are, and I can avoid them. I have tried to quantify what a trigger means to me for nine years, and I haven’t really come up with a good solution.

The biggest trigger I have is smell. Whether it’s my abuser’s old perfume, or the air smells just the way it did when I was standing there with that journal, asking what certain things meant. I think that is true for all trauma, the way the smell of the smoke in our recent house fire took me back to the one my family had when I was 11.

Music doesn’t bother me, generally, but there are a few choir pieces and opera arias that I have put away. If I’m in a church choir that is doing one of the pieces that for me, acts as a trigger, I don’t sing that day. I don’t even go to rehearsals that contain it.

One of the things that I’ve done for the last probably, ten years that I refuse to do now is minimize. Everything that has happened to me is now being given its full meaning and weight. I am no longer trying to make it look lesser than, that things weren’t as bad as I thought. In order to know how bad it was, you cannot just know my side of the story. You have to know the life story of the woman who emotionally abused me as well, and how that pathology affected me. I can only tell my story and a teeny, tiny part of hers. There’s so much more you will never find on this web site that you would find if you looked in other areas. For instance, none of our mutual friends except Dana has ever talked to my dad about what I was like as a teenager.

I can think of a few more I’d like to have him school. Some because I still don’t understand their reactions, some because I just want my people to know who I really am without pretense or bullshit.

I am coming into my power. I am 45 years old. Either this year or within a few years half of my life will be over, using my 92 year old grandfather as an example. A whole lot of shit I used to care about doesn’t even exist now in terms of my focus.

Like getting all upset because Daniel is in love with me and I know it. He has been for 36 years. Let me get this straight. A military doctor wants to be with me, and he’s telling me up front that he’s an alcoholic and has PTSD and is going to rehab to change himself and just wants another writer to lie next to in bed with both our laptops going…… and I’m going to freak out because he’s male and not female? I got this picture in my head of Jonna and Tony Mendez writing “The Moscow Rules” on a king-sized bed and thought, “why not?”

Here’s why I didn’t freak out, and it’s all my trans friends’ fault (I’m really grateful and I’m teasing). I realized that there was just enough man in me to be absolutely terrified that a straight dude wouldn’t like me AS A PARTNER. Straight dudes love me in general. Instead of thinking of myself as a bisexual woman, I had to game this relationship out as a trans man. This is because I knew that Daniel had never been in a gay relationship before, and so his reaction to my gender identity would never be negative, he just might be confused. I needed him to know that I express as male sometimes, and that has to be okay with him. Luckily, it very much is.

But this is just the beginning of a very, very long story. Please do not think that I have lost my fucking mind. Daniel doesn’t start rehab until January 5th. He lives in NE Texas. There is no possible way we will even see each other until his rehab is over, and that could take up to a few months. We’re talking about living separately for at least a year, because if he moves to DC we might screw ourselves over by skipping dating and just moving in. It wouldn’t be a deliberate screwover- DC is expensive and it might seem tempting to have one household “since we want to be together, anyway….” Eyeroll………

My perfect picture of Daniel and me is that we visit each other a few times in 2023, and then think seriously about stability after 2023 is over. This does not mean that we won’t be in contact at all, just not physically sharing the same space. Rediscovering each other through calls and letters for a year before going all in.

I am also not saying that Daniel is my forever person. I am saying that he’s one of them. Maybe it will be this fairy tale in which I suddenly transform into the perfect heterosexual wife. However, my money is not on that. My money is on Daniel becoming so important to me that he becomes a priority, and it is too damn early in our relationship to put constraints on what that actually looks like. Just be happy for me that I have someone that loves me and is in my corner. That if I get into a Situation, it’s handled. Don’t look into the future and try to pigeonhole us as friends or married. Let us decide that over the next few years on our own.

I am turning a corner in my sexuality. I am less sure about my gender than I ever have been, which has made me flexible about everything else. I was telling my friend Zac that I was feeling very non-binary, without the need to come out or change pronouns. How that plays out in my relationship with Daniel is that I feel like a partner, not the archetype one sees in their minds eye of a “wife.”

I have also been a wife before, but not to a man. My definition of “wife” comes from that context, and I don’t know enough about men to know whether my definition and theirs is similar. My saving grace is that Daniel is attracted to my personality. I don’t think he would have been attracted to me if I was male on the outside, because sexual orientation is a thing. But what I do know is that if I look at myself in the completely genderqueer, genderfluid, non-binary but doesn’t give a crap about pronouns kind of way, Daniel still loves that person.

I’m not becoming less. He’s becoming more. He’s opening himself up to the possibility of not being with the picture and definition of “woman” he’s always known.

It took me back a bit. All of the sudden, someone from my past reappeared, and I want to talk to her “privately.”

Dear Karen,

I remember the first time I saw you like it was yesterday. We were out in the sun at Chuy’s on Westheimer, and I was completely suckered in by your preppy attire. I mean obviously, my wife teased me about seeing you and running into a door for like four years. What might have seemed schoolgirlish actually made me relax and find peace within myself. You were the first woman I’d ever met who identified as straight and also wore men’s clothes without making it a big deal. Nine times out of ten, it was men’s styles in a women’s cut. Every time I looked at you, I saw a little more of who I wanted to be on the outside. I saw a style that fit me on someone else.

You might think it’s because I thought you looked like a lesbian. Actually, that’s not it at all. I saw the way your husband looked at you and realized that I was putting too much emphasis on my clothes. That what I wore wasn’t advertising anything. That if a straight woman could out butch me any day of the week, then wear whatever I want. Nothing about my wardrobe says that I am seeking attention from men or women.

I know this because now I’m divorced, it’s eight years later, and now a man wants to be with me. I said yes. I said yes because I looked at you on that warm April day, and knew that he would love me no matter what. I saw a style that fit me on someone else.

Best,
Leslie