partnership – Stories That Are All True

One of my confidants once told me that I have an enormous ability to love. She also said that I had an enormous ability for rage. What I have to say about that is I’m a trumpet player and a soprano, and Sam proved it to me for three weeks straight. One of the trumpet players I followed religiously as a tween and teen was Doc Severinson in Johnny Carson’s old band. When I was 12, I thought I was destined to take over for him, but I have said many many times that there was a flaw in my plan. I didn’t practice enough.

I wanted to. I wanted to practice six hours a day like my dad did, but I started out as a euphonium player. I had braces, and the trumpet mouthpiece was too small. However, the euphonium mouthpiece was large enough to fit over them, trumpet training wheels.

Well, taking the training wheels off didn’t go very well. I had a beautiful, fat sound I was in love with and an embouchure I wasn’t. I went years without acknowledging that I was in physical and emotional pain about it. That I would never be the kind of musician I wanted to be, and I had chosen an instrument before I really gave voice a chance.

In voice, I might not have made All-State in “the system” (code for Texas Music Educator’s Association, or TMEA), but I would have had a WAY better shot. When I was untrained with raw talent, I was okay. Once I was trained I was fabulous. I can’t sing like Jennifer Hudson or Beyonce. You’re thinking of Lindsay, my younger sister. I’m the one that owns at classical music….. just everything from early English to Hebrew. I speak many, many languages through choir, even if I don’t know the direct translation. In “the system,” I made it to All Region as an alto, but marching contest was on the same day. They literally couldn’t do without me. I was screwed.

Today I found out I feel the same way about Daniel. That if he wasn’t in my life, I would never recover. There are many, many, many reasons for this, but let me tell you one fundamental.

My mother was a substitute music teacher for my elementary school when I was in third through fifth grades. When I was in third grade, my mother took over for my music teacher. Guess who was in my class?

He is the only person that has asked to date me since my mother died that knew her well, even if it was in childhood. Daniel went to school with me from second to sixth grade. I lived longer in Naples, Texas than I did anywhere else as a preacher’s kid. Daniel knows my dad in his capacity as a pastor, and legit no one remembers or talks about that except when my biological sister and I are alone, because we’re the only ones that have that context……

Or we were, anyway.

I am way less interested in the fact that I am losing my lesbian label forever and way more in the fact that of the four personality elements in Meyers-Briggs, three of ours match. He is also an Idealist and writer. He’s been to war, which means his stories are awesome and I love to listen and read.

I think I’m obsessed with him. It’s good the feeling is mutual. Just puke. I remember his little boy voice and it’s irritating because I know it will absolutely make me nauseous to other people when he moves here.

We’re playing around with titles to call each other later in life. I am tickled by “wife partner,” because I’m a writer and it’s a play on words. The most sugary way to tell someone you’re a gay couple is “she’s my life partner.” Or, because I’m old, it was the term before wife was a thing among female couples.

I have purposely started asking all people when they only say that they’re married and I don’t know their partner how they gender identify. I want to know pronouns ahead of time, especially before I meet them so I don’t have preconceived notions about their gender before their identity is presented to me and I get in the wrong habit of something. Also, visibility matters, and being in a relationship is one of those things where no one’s choice should be a pejorative. Let people do life with whoever they want. Christ, it’s so much harder than everyone thinks. Let people have their pleasures, and marriages are…. or they’re supposed to be. The thing I am least worried about in this relationship is getting along, because we were raised in the same context.

That also means more to me than Daniel being a man. Pretty much everything does.

I recently lost the person I thought of as my inner compass, the one that would be the one at the end of my letters for all time. Something that I thought was irreplaceable isn’t so much. It’s comforting, though I’m not bragging. I’m relieved. She was my true North, everything that was honorable about me when I couldn’t be that for myself. It gave me hope, strength, love, and faith until it didn’t and I realized that I was in too deep to fix whatever was wrong, because she didn’t talk. I could try to clean up the mess on my own, but as we say in Texas, “you can’t help a little old lady across the street if she doesn’t want to go…. particularly when she is banging her purse.”

Editor’s Note:

I have a ton of funny Texas sayings and I will be publishing them at some point, as well as a clip of Daniel talking eventually so that all my friends could hear what my accent sounded like before we moved to Houston….. Naples was roughly 1600 people when we lived there. Not sure what it is now. Sufficed to say that Houston was……… a change for me.

The capacity to love Daniel comes so easily to me that it’s scary, and I can tell that I am ramping up with dopamine, such a blessing because when I wake up in the morning my brain chemicals are right. I am literally going gangbusters, and feeling the connection I felt 36 years ago return full force. There are so many reasons for this.

None of them having to do with me just meeting the right man. Homophobia sucks. I know there’s going to be a lot of people reading this who are Evangelicals. I’m not. Sexuality is a spectrum. It has been proven by science…. many, many researchers, not just one study. I would say look into it, but my guess is that you won’t. So don’t judge me. You can’t know that part of me. It is not for you. Who in their right minds wants to be involved in my sex life if they’re not my partner? Please don’t think I need that kind of help. I gave you “what you want.” It looks like what you want from the outside, but it isn’t. I write and I know things. You may write, but not about me to the extent that I do.

It wasn’t easy going back to memories of my supposed elementary school friends bullying me, and this is not something I’ve addressed with Daniel yet. It’s just something he’ll have to come to me about later when he’s had some time to digest. It’s just that if and when I go to our hometown, there are people I don’t care to see (not you). It’s not because I carry any ill will or even care that I was bullied. It’s not taking the chance that they’re just bigger now. I will serve them their asses fried, and no one needs to see that. I just pictured Dana laughing at that, and it cracked me up. She would have an absolutely unprintable response, so line cook that it tickles me to death that I know it and you don’t.

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