moving out

I’m sitting up in bed watching the light. The early morning light, the light through the tall windows of this villa front bedroom, through the gauze of the net curtains; dappled where it travelled the branches of the sour cherry outside the window, making an obtuse triangle on the wall opposite, the shadow of branches playing lightly across.

There is washing on, more washing. Washing folded and put away earlier while I waited for the kettle to boil. New sheets out ready to replace the ones I am sitting on here, and a full load of washing nearly dry on the line that I put out last night. The dregs of the dishes the girls washed the night before last sit dry as a bone in the dishrack, waiting to be put away. The vacuum cleaner sits patiently in a corner of the dining room, soon to be used. These are the ways I love my house.

There are no children to be fed today, none standing at the bench right now helping themselves to too much yoghurt, a third of a block of cheese, almost an entire cucumber. Their loud music is not on in the kitchen, they are not lying about in the lounge in their pyjamas watching youtube. Their bedroom floors are not strewn with yesterday’s clothes and last night’s books. They are simply not here. The only noise, save these fingers typing, is outside. Birds in the garden, every now and then a car down on the main road.

A bowl of fruit salad waits for me in the fridge, a breakfast gift. Made by the girls last night at Pat’s place. I might see them today. They still have only one of most things. Togs, sun hats, most-loved soft toys, currently-read books, favourite clothes. These things they drag with them from his place to mine, or mine to his, at the beginning of every week. Or go back for if something’s been forgotten. Oh how modern it is, how twenty-first century, to grow up living in two houses.

What have I done? I have irrevocably altered the fabric of their lives. I did this not by coming out, not by moving into my own bedroom and then dragging us over town to a bigger house with a bedroom for all of us. They hardly blinked at that. No, it was moving out that changed things the most. And it was the conversations that happened leading up to the move which caused the most consternation. That was when this shit got real.

You talk to a woman who’s been the key player in the break-up of her family and ask her about the reaction she received. You can be sure she will have stories of sideways glances at the school playground, a dwindling number of friends who call, and from those who do, a steady barrage of unsolicited advice. She will tell you how it feels to be the recipient of someone else’s anxiety, about loaded questions which say more about the questioner than her own actual situation.  We might be in the twenty-first century but we still have an unwritten rule that mothers don’t rock the boat, that mothers suck it up. And above all, that a mother can be true to herself only as much as her truth doesn’t “damage” her children.

There was no room for me in that big house with a bedroom for everyone, as big as it was.  Physical space does not automatically create psychological space. And the unfolding of something new cannot always happen in the midst of the familiar. That house was a Noah’s ark for us as the family-that-was, it held us together as we rocked back and forth through an entire year post my coming out. A year in separate bedrooms, a year to reel and fight and grieve, a year to give the girls the time to accept this unwanted change. A year for me to clear my head, to figure out exactly what everything meant.

That we stayed together for so long, in some semblance of what we were, is a credit to Pat. Bit by bit he found a way to get his head around the enormous disruption my coming out had caused. But I engineered that year together, I found the house and made it happen. And I did it partly for me, to give me time to listen to myself and to re-group. But really I did it because I wasn’t ready to break us. I wasn’t ready to break anything. I was trying to hold us all together. I had caused the fall, and I thought I could somehow run around and catch us too.

I moved out in November – on the anniversary of my coming out to Pat. I packed up my things, my books and bookcases, my journals and photo albums and boxes of ferreted-away mementos. I took what was needed to function as a household, to be a subset of what was. I had to buy a fridge and a bit more furniture, but not much. And the first weekend I moved into the new house – the villa next door – the girls came too. That was the start of their first week with me, and along with the dog they’ve done 50/50 between houses since then.

Are they ok? That’s a good question. But it’s a question to ask them, and not for a few years yet. My coming out and subsequent breaking of the family will leave an indelible mark. It will be a big chapter in the story of their lives. A chapter marked with bold caps and expletive emojis. A chapter peopled with anxiety and grief. I’m so sorry about that chapter. I’m so sorry it will be there because of me. And yet I’m most interested in the chapter that will come afterwards. I wait and watch with anticipation and pride as they write it every day. They are brave and they are bold and they are becoming themselves.

Meanwhile, I get to start again. How do I want to live? Who do I want to love? What is most important to me and how will I make that happen? These are the decisions I get to make here in my own house, in my own space, in my own new beginning. These are the decisions I make now as I write these words sitting on this bed, the light pouring in. I make them for myself and I make them for my girls. I show them how to live.

coming out

Corsair Bay, January 2017

Let me tell you about coming out. About waking up in the middle of the night in the second week of that brave new world, and sitting up suddenly in bed, eyes wide. I’m gay, I whispered into the darkness. I’m actually gay. And suddenly I found myself on my knees beside the bed, hands clasped. I want to live my best life. I want to live my actual life. It was a prayer. A promise. My vow to me.

How did I do it? How did I do those first days of knowing, sludging through grief and shock, not breathing a word out loud. Panicked and stricken with every thought of the future, every thing that would not be. All the plans so tenderly hoped for. Every goal we’d worked so hard for. And the girls. The girls. I told Pat late on a Saturday evening in November, over a year ago now. After a long day of waiting, knowing it was time to tell him the truth. After writing it in my journal for the first time that morning; I’m gay. And then saying those brand new words out loud to a friend that afternoon. I couldn’t go a moment longer without telling him.

It was like there had been a death in the family, we both felt it. The words had come out quickly, tumbled out clumsily, because there was no point in prolonging anything. I’ve realised I’m gay, I said. You know the thing I was upset about last weekend, I’ve realised why I was so upset about it. It’s because there’s something I’m wanting that’s more than what I have in my life right now. I want to be in a relationship with a woman. I’m gay. And we both sat there stunned.

We went on our own journeys of mourning. It was the hardest thing to see him hurting because of what I’d done, and not be able to do anything about it. I moved out of our bedroom. First to the couch in the lounge, with my pile of books and hairbrush and things perched on the edge of the bookcase. Then into what had been his office. First on a mattress on the floor, then on a bed of my own, single, for the first time in 17 years. One day I went back into what had been our bedroom to get some clothes and I stood at the dresser and looked over at the space where my bedside table used to be, where I had sat up in bed all those hours writing, working on my thesis. That space which had been so nurturing, so wholly mine. And I fell on my knees at the end of the bed and wept.

There was never enough crying. I never got to the end of it. Not the first week before I told a soul, when I cried whenever I was somewhere no one could see me, nor the weeks after as I settled into my new room. There were always more tears. It was a private grief, hidden from the world. Isolated and utterly lonely. It was the only way I knew. I had to do the work on my own.

And I did it thoroughly. Writing screeds in my journal. Re-reading back over years of old journals, remembering the marriage that was. How hard we worked. How much it cost. There were therapist sessions by skype, and long conversations with a few close friends. Nobody questioned what I was doing. Everyone who knew me could see it was the truth. Everyone who knew me could see I was doing exactly the thing I needed to do to stay alive. I was rescuing myself. I was giving myself a life.

I took the girls to Christchurch for a few days that January. It’s our big smoke now that we live in the South and we love it. We are regulars at the Christchurch Art Gallery and the Margaret Mahy Park, and at my sister’s place over by the beach, where weather-beaten houses perch beside wild sand dunes.  It was my first trip away with the girls since coming out, and I knew somewhere deep down that it was a taste of a new way of being family, of the new shape that would eventually form out of the ashes of what was. And I’m always up for an adventure. The road was what I needed.

For a dark moment somewhere between the December after I came out and the January of a new year, I faltered. The thought of everything I was breaking was almost paralysing. I was taking what I had worked so hard to build and ripping it apart with my very own hands. I couldn’t fathom it. It was excruciating. And yet as I wondered if I could just take the words back, pretend I’d never said them, pretend I could carry on as I was, I felt the shadow of depression cloud over me somewhere. I realised that to go back was to go down. I knew that if I didn’t keep moving forwards something dark and empty would suck me under.

I drove away from my sister’s place one evening and instead of carrying on to where we were staying I took the tunnel road through the Port Hills to Lyttleton. I had the sudden urge to explore, to go somewhere I’d never been before. What a surprise it was to see the tunnel open up to the harbour and the port below, the broad mass of ordered logs waiting on the way to somewhere else. The hills on the other side were warm in the setting light, beckoning, hinting at hidden bays behind soft curves. I kept driving until we got to Corsair Bay. The carpark was staggered in layers, and the slope of the land led our eyes down to a thick band of trees which I knew must hide the beach below. I wanted to see it.

We walked a worn path down through the trees, passing families making their way back up, arms filled with the paraphernalia needed for a day at the beach. Below the trees was an old concrete sea wall, tracing the shape of the small bay, the water and harbour reaching out beyond it. I sat on the edge and watched the girls paddle in the dark and silky water. There was a fixed raft out where the bay opened to the harbour, and people were still swimming out there in the fading light. I saw a couple of swimmers even further than the raft. Swimming in a straight line towards the moored boats. This was their regular exercise, I imagined. These swimmers were owning the wild space that was the broad expanse of harbour. They were not content with the shallows.

I could have stayed in that old, familiar life. But what kind of life would it have been? What stories would I have written? Not the ones I’m writing now. Not the ones that wait, just below the surface of things. The ones I will write now that finally I know who I am. Would you have wished a half-life for me? Would anyone who really knew me be happy for me to live any less than the wild and broad life that waits for me? But I didn’t do it for you.

All those years led me. The marriage, the family, the building and the stretching and the growing up. I gave my best. I was faithful. And look what came out of it; three incredible women. Three women who are growing up too, who will take a path towards themselves and, I can only hope, not waver.

lit up

The sun was full and bright through the lounge sliding doors this afternoon and I knew what I wanted. I came and sat down, crossed my legs and turned my palms upwards. It’s a good spot to meditate, there on the lounge floor. The glass doors look out over the deck and the houses below and up to the hills on the other side of the valley. In winter the sun sets early but wild, in a straight line across the roof of our house and onto the lounge floor. I sat in the sun and shut my eyes. And there it was. The peace that comes when I’m ready for it.

The sun was so wide and strong over me sitting there that I could see it through my eyelids. As if it were the middle of summer and I had flecks of sun-blur beckoning me from the corner of my eye. I felt like a trumpet-shaped flower just opened, a snap-dragon or an exotic datura flower, narrow and long with the stamen and pollen deep in its centre, the sun pouring through.  As if for the first time the full blast of sun could reach its core.

It’s hard to describe how right now feels for me. But if you can imagine a flower just unfurled for the first time, you might get close. I’ve spent a lot of my life in a strange state of creative barrenness, whole parts of me curled up and hidden, far from the light. And yet in another sense I have been growing myself all this time. I have been growing myself in those dark and hidden places, and here I am. I am my own fruit.

I can understand why people might feel sad about our news. The news that I have realised I am lesbian, and that Pat and I are recreating our relationship. It’s the end of an era, the end of the relationship as it was. Certainly last November and December – the time immediately following my enormous realisation – are worth feeling sad about. Both of us in massive shock at that time, both in various stages of grief. Both full of fear for the future, and for each other. And yet if you saw us now, if you were sitting at the dining table this afternoon with a cup of tea while the sun streamed in, you’d realise we’ve got it pretty good.

All I asked for back in November was my own bedroom. All I could say to Pat was; I love you, I’m gay. Because at that point it was all I knew. Just give me time, I asked. Time to process what this means. He did. We started a long conversation about what it would look like for us to live in the same house and remain a family, even with us in different bedrooms, even just for a time. On a grey day we saw a house for sale over in the valley. Five bedrooms upstairs and an office and rumpus downstairs. We were prickly with each other, our words laced with anxiety, but I knew this house was something. Let’s give ourselves the chance to grow into something new.

I went and bought myself a bed five days after I told Pat the truth. I was in a daze, hardly eating, hardly sleeping, functioning on instinct. I bought the kind of bed I’ve always wanted. And I bought a single bed. I couldn’t articulate much that week, but what I did know was that I was coming out as lesbian for myself. I wasn’t doing it to replace one relationship with another. I was doing what I needed to do to love myself.

When I wrote here on this blog that I was bisexual, I was elated. I was elated to be telling the world I knew I could love a woman, that I had loved a woman. Yet at the same time I felt a palpable regret somewhere deep, a regret that I had never given myself the permission to act on what I knew my heart was capable of. I wish, like I’ve never wished for anything in my life, that I got to come out at an earlier age, I wrote. I read those words now and feel the longing pour off them.

But those regrets are gone. I look back over the years now and see something which I can only describe as a miracle unfolding. Each moment or marker in time borne out of what I understood about myself at that point. The day I married Pat; one of the happiest days in my living memory. I’d spent the years leading up to it wading in and out of depression, with no real idea how to make a life for myself. Pat made me laugh, encouraged me to take risks, to dream and to adventure. Marrying him was my first real act of agency. A choice I made for myself. And in doing so I chose someone who would provide the fight I needed to grow, and who would love me as I journeyed home to myself.

I understand how breakups get toxic. I’ve watched us teeter on the thin line between love and hate over and over. I understand why divorce is brutal. Why it makes people bitter. I get how it is that the person we once loved can become a complete stranger. But somehow we’ve managed to come out the other side of crisis still friends. Still able to look each other in the eye. I don’t know exactly how we got here. I think grace has something to do with it.

In many ways where we are now doesn’t look a lot different from where we were. We still eat altogether at our oversized table. The dog still lies on his side in the middle of the kitchen floor while we try to get dinner cooked. The lunches still get made, the music practice still happens, the girls still spend most of their waking lives running or singing or yelling. We’re a family.

That photo up there is a random one from last night’s Mid-Winter Carnival. We bundled the girls into the car and drove into town, nudged our way through the crowds and found a spot at the side of the Octagon. There we stood side by side in the freezing cold and took in the wonder of it all; the lanterns, the children carrying them, the bold shapes of light bright against the ink black sky.

right now

The girls are cooking dinner, a bastardised version of nachos using shoestring oven fries, something they can cook without blowing up the kitchen. They’ve got music on, and I can hear the bass, strong and reliable, from the other end of this small house. They’re singing one of the songs from Moana loud – like really loud – and I can tell by the way they are singing that they feel like they’re on top of the world.

The sun is finally out and glowing bright on the desk in my study. The leaves on the cabbage tree out this window are glowing too, and I remember what it was like to have sun on demand, back up in Auckland, more sun than we needed. In those days the morning sun streamed in across the wooden floorboards of our funny oversized house and turned them yellow, and the late afternoon sun on its way down lit up the bush that spread out all the way to the harbour in front of us, golden green.

The life we lived up in that faraway place was completely different to the one we live here. Sometimes I think back on it and shake my head, as if remembering the flash of a dream the morning after. Did we really have all that space, all that sun, did we really go down to the beach on the other side of our own bush and swim? Did we drive ten minutes down the road and find the bush peel back to reveal the harbour wide wide and blue green all the way to the heads? We did.

But I wouldn’t have it back. There was a dark underbelly to that life. So much time given over to getting from one place to another, waiting in traffic, crawling down the motorway. There were complications between ourselves and others that we couldn’t make head or tail of up there.  And then there was the exhaustion, the anxiety, and this pervasive sense which never really went away that we weren’t quite getting there. Wherever there was.

Distance was needed. To pick ourselves up by the scruff of the neck and throw ourselves down to the bottom of the country. We went as far as we could – we couldn’t have thrown ourselves much further. I’m not knocking Invercargill, that strange old beast that holds New Zealand’s most southern parts together, but we’re not cut out for small town life. We needed somewhere big enough to give us that feeling of being in the middle of things. We had friends in Dunedin, and the house prices, well you know about the house prices. So Dunedin it was.

I feel like every stage of my life has been completely different to the others. I’ve got several large plastic storage bins’ worth of journals, at least one for every year of my life from about the age of fifteen. It’s a gigantic mass of words, and the detail is overwhelming. Here is how I felt when I was eighteen and thought I was about to take on the world. Here is what my life was like in those vaguely-lost years I spent working in the fiction section of the Queen St Whitcoulls store. There is my first year teaching, right up until I burnt out just before the end of Term 4 and the pages go blank. And those agonisingly exquisite first weeks of my eldest daughter’s life in detail, including feed times and night wakings and the shadow of depression, always the sting in the tail.

I could put my hand down into that mass of words a hundred times over and each time I’d pull out a different story. In each one the light would be slightly altered, the view changed. There would be something new, something freshly learnt, a sense of awakening in each of them, as if now I understood. But how many times over would I have to learn a variation of the same thing before I could live it? How many times would I have to walk around the same track before I realised it wasn’t the track I wanted to be on?

Things are changing here. There is a new house waiting for us in the valley, north-facing and ample. There are established vegetable beds, a green house and a hand-me-down tramp waiting in the back corner of the garden. We’ve let go of one dream to grab hold of right now, to make the most of the present, the one we are living, the one that is ours. It doesn’t look exactly like we thought it would. It’s complicated in ways I never expected, and yet there’s a naturalness, an ease to living in the now that makes me want more of it. It feels like something somewhere between acceptance and surrender, and both are incredible.

You can sure there will be stories to tell out of all of this. Sitting here writing to you is part of what helps make sense of everything. I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling like I don’t know very much but of course I do. I know about having to learn the same thing over and over. I know about being nineteen, twenty, twenty-five and convinced that my actual life was just around the corner, that as soon as I could get x, y, z lined up, life would begin. I know how it feels to look back and wonder why it took so long to get to here, to wonder why right now was so long in the making.

The girls are still dancing in the kitchen. Belting out the Moana soundtrack as if their lives depended on it. I know how they feel. They’ve got that sense like they’re on the edge of the rest of their lives. It’s the thrill of getting the notes out mixed with the thrill of all the possibility and potential of their as-yet-unseen future. They are becoming themselves with every breath. I know how they feel, because I remember exactly. There in those piles of journals, where the words wait patiently for the stories to be plucked out, is everything I know and everything I’ve ever learnt. Pull up your chair.

seven, ten

I had a dream the other night. I was in the passenger seat of a large bus, and my daughter Greer was driving. We were trying to get to the bus stop where she was going to take another bus to school. But she was having trouble stopping. She turned down the wrong road. Went left when I was trying to tell her to go right. I was worried she was going to miss the bus and it was frustrating to watch. Yet she was doing a pretty good job of driving, for a kid.

I’ve dreamt a lot of buses in the last year. Buses, cars, boats. My dreams have been punctuated with transport imagery. I’ve dreamt conversations in cars, long journeys through changing scenery. I’ve travelled alone, I’ve travelled with companions, I’ve had my companions change within the same dream. One minute I’m travelling with my sister, and then all of a sudden I’m not.  The cars are always going somewhere, the buses are always huge. Sometimes I’m trying to get large numbers of students all on one bus. Sometimes I’m in the dark.

Abigail, my youngest, turned seven yesterday. Wow. It is a little number and she is a little person and yet seven is a whole lifetime. I remember being seven and how long ago babyhood seemed to me even then, how it felt like I’d been alive for an age. I was no longer in my infancy, no longer completely dependent. I was dreaming and planning and reading and imagining and escaping; writing little poems in the exercise book my teacher gave me especially for words. Poems about pigs and daffodils and books.

How will she shine, this newly seven year old girl of mine? What will light her up? What will she do that makes her heart sing, that makes her shiver on the inside? It’s too early to tell. Like any parent, we want her to enjoy being herself, to grow into herself, to become comfortable in her own skin. We nudge her in certain directions, provide opportunities, take note of her interests, but in the end only she can possibly know. Who she is. Where she wants to go. What paths she wants to take.

I don’t always write about my daughters here. I’m aware of the obvious; not everyone has children. I don’t presume that all who read here identify with or are interested in parenting stories. And yet I see mothering and fathering in the broadest possible sense, as roles we can all embody at different times, if we choose to. I love what French feminist philosopher Irigaray wrote about mothering; that we are always mothers once we are women.  And perhaps that same sense of universal father-ness is available to men too. But more than that, I believe the best way to understand ourselves is to reflect on our family of origin. Our first family.  When I write about my children I’m connecting with the child I was.

Greer, the middle sister, is about to turn ten. She’s a feisty, fiery young woman, and every day she gets a little more sure of herself. That dream I had of her driving a bus, a ridiculous vehicle for a child to be driving, seems to remind me of what I know instinctually about her life. That she is in the driver’s seat. That her life belongs to her. I’m close beside her, watching every move, but I’m not driving. No matter how challenging the road gets, the bus is hers. And as much as I take my responsibilities as a parent seriously, other than in an obvious emergency it’s vital that I don’t take the wheel.

When I was her age, I didn’t know what it felt like to be in the driver’s seat of my life. I didn’t have that kind of control or agency. There are reasons for this, and I’ve reflected on all of them over the last few years as I’ve become aware of the ways in which that lack has played out in my adult life. I’ve witnessed chilling depths of powerlessness within myself, and in the moment I saw the worst of it I had two choices; either collapse in on myself or change. So I changed, slowly,  almost everything about the way I live. I’ve seen, with frightening clarity, what my life would have looked like if I didn’t step into my own driver’s seat.

I had a pretty ordinary childhood. You probably experienced some of the things I did. Maybe we watched TV at the same time after school, maybe we were both brought up on the DPB. Maybe you lived on a street lined with familiar state houses too, with a rusty car on the grass verge five houses down. Maybe you packed your bag to go and see your dad like I did. God knows there were and are great hordes of us who did that. It’s nothing so unusual.

But for all the reasons, for whatever reason, for all the whys and wherefores and ways I was and wasn’t and would never be, I grew up broken. So when I dream that my daughter is in the driver’s seat of her own bus and I’m right there, and even though I can see how much she has to lose if she gets it wrong my hand doesn’t reach out even once to grab the steering wheel, I’m a happy woman. Every day I get to start again.

 

building plans

We went for a walk along the harbour the other weekend. The girls rode their bikes ahead of us, wheeling off into the distance and then coming back again. It was a beautiful day, warm and clear, although over on the edge of the harbour the wind was cold. On the way home we stopped at the section we’re planning to build on, to pick apples from the trees at the very top. It was amazing to be there in the full afternoon sun, looking down over the valley and the hills on the other side. It’s a little piece of paradise, and one day we’ll live there.

The apples we picked sit overflowing in front of me here on the table. Two bowls of them;  red and tart and real. I look at them and I am amazed. Apples from our own trees! We’ve been eating them crisp and fresh every day, and cooking them with cinnamon and ghee until they are soft and unctuous. We are producing, it seems, after some lean years. The fruit may be tentative, but it can’t be denied. There it is – hanging off the north facing trees of our future.

This is how it is you see; we’ve lived through a long winter. It’s been three or four years now of harsh weather. The worst weather I’ve seen, a full range of extremes. Gale force winds, heavy blasts of rain, low grey clouds for months at a time. I’ve learnt how to batten down the hatches, how to step in and shut the door behind me. I had no alternative but to pay attention to my interior spaces. Sometimes it takes us a long time to learn how to give ourselves what we need the most.

I’ve been off facebook for a while now and one of the reasons I left was because I got sick of all the rubbish that kept filling up my feed. Superficial ten point nothings about how to have a successful relationship, blah-blah-blahs about how marriage is nothing to do with what you need it’s all about what you can give the other person. These are particular views, hailing from the evangelical headquarters of the world, and once upon a time I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at them. But I can’t stomach that kind of garbage anymore.

There was a time early on in the stormy weather, when the fierceness of it was still bewildering, that I thought fixing our relationship was what needed to happen. Financial difficulty had triggered the storms, as it often does, but it was the fundamental weaknesses in our relationship that were uncovered almost immediately. Whole sections of roof lifted off in the wind and what we’d managed to avoid noticing was now plainly clear.  There were rooms missing entire exterior walls, and half the house needed re-piling. We’ve never liked the idea of giving up, so we worked at it. We sought professional opinion, made game plans, developed strategies. There were late night dramas, bags packed and unpacked, ultimatums delivered, and whole sections of the house abandoned, deemed completely unliveable. Everything was negotiable.

But as soon as we patched up one corner, another blew out in the wind. The repair list didn’t seem to be getting any smaller, no matter how many things we crossed off. And the weather wasn’t letting up. It was the longest winter. One day I stepped out of the house and looked at the surrounding land. It was good, flat land with a northern aspect, and there was so much more of it than either of us had realised. I picked up a shovel and started digging. Before I knew it, I had the ground prepared for the foundations of a small house. I ordered concrete, supervised the delivery, and then kept building. Once Pat saw what I was doing, he did the same thing a few paces away. We got on with the difficult but completely necessary job of building ourselves.

To say we ditched the flimsy edifice that was this relationship we’d tried to put together, is an understatement. All that is left now of that weather-beaten building are a few piles of old bricks, a corner of concrete poking out of the earth. We keep it there as a reminder, a warning for our children. We’ll tell them the story when they’re old enough to understand, and hopefully it will mean something to them. But it’s more than just a cautionary tale. It’s a testament; a bold monument to hope and to the possibility for change than exists within all of us.

Meanwhile, I’m still building. It takes work to go right back to the foundations of our lives and start again. I’ve had to make some hard calls, and there are parts of my life that may still look ugly to the outside eye. Everything I do now is intentional, I do it because it works for me, because it helps me to build. I have no interest in keeping up appearances, or in putting energy into what is superficial or false. I’ve lost friends, allowed formative relationships to lie fallow, abandoned a million “shoulds” and “must-do’s.” I’m finally learning how to look after myself – I wouldn’t have survived otherwise.

And it’s very nice to have company as I build. It’s a miracle, in some ways, that Pat and I still love each other. But it’s even more of a miracle, I think, that we are friends. Even better friends now than we were before. We have fifteen years together, which is long enough to create history. We share a tall stack of memories, haunting and otherwise. I know not everyone gets to start again together, and for many, separation is the only way forward. But the building requirements are the same. In the end, all we can do is build ourselves.

twelve years old

My big girl turned twelve last month. How about that. She’s growing, lanky and long, trying on curves for size. A was-child’s body barely containing the woman within. She’s waiting to break out.

What will that woman be like? I watch her and wonder. Kind, above all else. Thoughtful and sensitive, without a doubt. Inquisitive and searching, definitely. Light hearted and fun-seeking, yes. Growing in confidence and attitude, in gut feelings and feisty reactions, I pray so. Developing a voice that speaks without hesitation, that says, “this is me, this is who I am, and this is how I expect to be treated.” Come on girl!

It’s my moment, I know, I can feel it in my bones. This is where I get to play my most important role. Everything else almost pales in comparison. The babywearing, the midnight feeds, the cuddles, the songs, the stories, the trips to the beach the zoo the park flooded with autumn leaves, they’re all in the past, their time is gone. This is where I get to take on the role of airfield officer, to put on my high-vis vest and get down there and clear the runway.  It’s a very serious job. Watch out anyone who tries to get in her way! And what can’t be moved, of course, we talk about. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.

I’m in the middle of a Masters in Education, carrying out research in the area of twice-exceptional students (students who are gifted and have some kind of disability). It’s a fascinating subject because it brings together so many different areas – giftedness, learning disabilities, disability studies, educational psychology, neuroscience, pedagogy, and all those important self’s: self-knowledge, self-concept, self-efficacy, self-awareness. I’m surrounded by case studies – at home and at school – so everything I read is real. I sit here in my tiny box of a study, piles of journal articles wherever I look, and I laugh, I cry, I talk back to the researchers I disagree with. I’m in heaven.

Part of my reading has been looking at the role of the family in talent development. It’s heavy going in places, sobering and inspiring at the same time. It all boils down to one very obvious fact – the influence of the family can be a determining factor in the development of a child’s potential. Whether their ability is developed to a high level or not can depend on the family context. Of course there are always exceptions. History gives us plenty of examples of highly successful individuals who succeeded despite their family background rather than because of it. But research has highlighted some interesting factors in the way a healthy family works to support the child’s development, and I find it fascinating.

Paula Olszewski-Kubilius points out that a disability in a child can set in motion within a family a psychological process that either helps or hinders the child’s development.  A disability combined with giftedness (which is what I’m studying) can result in reduced opportunities for the child’s development, or in a disproportionate focus on the disability, to the detriment of the gift. However, she interestingly suggests that any characteristic of a child that results in rejection by their parents (such as a disability), can help free the child from “strong psychological identification” with the parents, thereby supporting the development of the child’s own unique identity.

It reminds me of Jung’s idea of individuation. I’ve written about it before, I talk about it often. I’ve lived it, better late than never, and I believe in it. Individuation; the process by which we become our own unique selves, is a process contra naturam. Meaning, against human nature. To individuate we go against every force within us and without us that would will us to comply, to fit in, to keep the peace. Separating from our parents, defining ourselves as ‘other’ in relationship to them, is the first step. It’s teenage rebellion in a psychological frame. But it’s more than that too. It’s the hard work of pushing back on the world when the world tries to tell us who we are and how we should be behaving. It’s the risky, enormously brave step of standing up and saying “this is me, this is who I am, and this is how I expect to be treated.”

As far as my role in these teenage years goes, I realise the tarmac metaphor is limited. When the time comes for my twelve year old to take off into life she might rather dance than fly. Or paint, or sing, or yell. You get what I mean. But however she decides to do it, she’ll have my full support. It won’t all be, well which cliché shall I use? Fun and games? A walk in the park? Plain sailing? At some point I’ll be the thing she fights against with every ounce of her strength. I’ll represent everything she’s not, as she does the work of discovering what she is. I’m wincing at the thought, but I’m also kind of excited. It’s an amazing season to be in, full of potential and possibility, and I get to watch it unfold. The least I can do is get out of the way.

 

three

The dream was about collecting things from the past. We were visiting a strange city and I was looking in a cupboard for something that would give us a clue as to where we should be going. Was it a scrap of paper? A tourist brochure? I found a pile of papers, things I’d saved. An envelope full of little toys one of my daughters had left behind somewhere when she was younger. My mother-in-law had collected them up and posted them to us.

I got up and walked through the dark house to the kitchen while everyone else was asleep. It was the darkest morning we’ve had all year, and when I stepped out the back door to get chives for my lunch the light was grey and shadowy. I kept remembering things, everything echoed, everything was layered with memories, time was stacking itself up. I drove to school under a muted sky, feeling like I feel when I know I am a writer. A strange feeling of being full and floating at the same time. As if there are a million things waiting to be written. That if I only just sat and wrote, they would be revealed.

The other night in a dream I lost my boots. I thought, this is a dream, if I re-trace my steps I’ll find them. I walked up a curving staircase looking for the restaurant I thought I’d left them in, and as I walked I saw on every step, on either side of me, a myriad of small objects. Little ornaments, shells, small things filling every space on the stairs. And in the dream I was amazed. I knew I was dreaming, and I looked down at all those tiny things and realised every one of them was a symbol.

I’m so aware of time passing. My daughters were babies, once. I held them in my cradled arms, later propped them up on my left hip. That was the way they were carried, soft bums resting on the pelvis that made them, small backs tucked into the crook of my arm. The pose so natural that when I pick up someone else’s baby it all comes flooding back. How many things could I do with a baby on my hip? So many.

At the time I thought it would last forever. Youth, when we are in it, is an endless stretch. An expanse of time that seems to keep renewing itself. Age is a horizon so distant the eye can’t register the pace with which we travel towards it. And yet I see it now. The babies are sprouting, gangly and feisty and full of life. Their interior worlds proliferate. Daily they add new experiences, new skills, new awareness. She is swimming on her back. She moves, without anyone holding her. She has joined the orchestra, she knows how to stop and wait for the next bar when she makes a mistake. She has no spelling words this week, she got them all right the first time.

I am itching to tell them the stories. How I watched them play in the back garden of the house they were born to. The jacaranda tree in the middle of the yard was wide and whispery and underneath it was a blue cube playhouse bought second hand from a kindergarten. There was a plank from the roof into the tree, and a ladder to climb up to the roof. It was a convergence of worlds, each layer a new territory. There were piles of sand, leaves, branches, purple blossoms, books, plastic trowels, a family of soft toy animals, the trike with the trailer at the back. They were always busy, my daughters. They made things, they went places. I could barely keep up with them.

One warm September day we went for a walk and came back with the roof of the red canvas buggy covered with spring’s bounty. Yellow kowhai blossoms, seed pods, bold stalks of green grass, red leaves, tender pale petals. We made art that afternoon, outside on newspaper spread thick because I couldn’t fight the worry about the mess they were making. Later in the day she planted her precious kowhai seeds and watered them. She was sure they’d grow. There’s a photograph of her pale head bending down over a pot of soil, small fingers pressing into the dampness.

I took so many photos. I was desperate to remember. I took so many that in the end, with the limping thing that my brain often is, I couldn’t do anything with them. They wait patiently, digital versions of themselves, for me to attend. Thousands of photographs, each one a marker, a sign on the way to something, a symbol. I walk up the stairs of my mind searching them out, longing to find their meaning, to put them into a story for my three daughters.  There are gaps to fill, errors to compute, failings to apologise for. I am waiting, waiting for them to be old enough to tell.

I go to church

I go to church. Not the way I used to. Not three times a day, not desperate, not believing blindly. Not storing treasures in heaven, not trying to save people from hell, not piling up discrete answers to discrete questions. Not following behind myself with a clipboard and a pen and a checklist of required actions, a list of never-must-do’s.

I once stood in front of a full auditorium and earnestly declared “we all need Jesus.” It was a heart-felt plea, a genuine profession. I believed whole-heartedly that my faith was everything. My sustenance, my guide, my reason for being. I thought I couldn’t live without it. And I presumed that meant neither could you.

You may have been in the audience that day. You may have squirmed uncomfortably; perhaps you looked down and picked at your trousers when I made my earnest proclamation. You were sitting there at my invitation, your presence there in that bright school hall all the evidence of your unconditional support I’d ever need, not that I’d see it at the time. I was trying to win you over. I wanted you to see how much life I had, I wanted you to see the glow of the light I could feel burning me up on the inside. I was trying to convert you.

I could apologise, right here. I could come clean. I could tell you how sorry I am. That I’ve regretted that day, and all the days like it, for a long time. I could re-count my sins in a list as long as all four of our arms put together. I could repent. Oh the litany. Of all the things I could repent of. The assumptions, the narrow-mindedness, the fear. The fear. But I know you don’t need it.

You saw right through me. You saw how small I was, how afraid. You saw how the light glanced off my eyes and blinded me. You knew my world view was a shaky construction, held up by dogmatism, the most flimsy of flimsy supports. You knew, somewhere deep inside you, that if my faith was a building, it would fail every building code out. That I had not tested anything. I had put no weight on it at all.

And so you kindly tolerated my enthusiasm. You took my cheerful positivity at face value. I was happy, I was finding my way in the world and you were proud of me. You were interested in my life. I turned up at your house one night, ostensibly for no other reason than to say hi, and you were very glad to see me. At the end of the evening I asked you to pay for my bible college fees. I had believed the money would come, as everyone else around me did. And when it didn’t, I came and asked you. You said yes, of course.

It took a long time for everything to fall apart. Self-deception is the true world super-power. There were several bouts of depression, more than one round of mild burn-out, and still my story stayed the same. If I could just do the right things, and pray the right words, or get the right people to pray the right words, everything would be fine. I knew that something was wrong with me, but I couldn’t admit that something was wrong.

Life has an uncanny way of presenting us with the exact circumstances needed for us to learn exactly what we need to learn. Almost twenty years after the day I stood in front of you under the glaring lights of that sterile school hall, the day I graduated with the bible college diploma you had paid for, I finally found myself in the dark. Looking into the murky reality of my completely unknown self. Everything was steadily becoming undone, and there was nothing I could do about it. There was no area of my life that had not been touched by chaos. And it was the beginning of everything, the pre-labour of my own re-birth.

I’m waxing metaphorical here, I know. But hear me out. I thought I was already re-born. The story I’d been told, that I had absorbed and recounted a million times, was that I began again the moment I believed. It seemed so simple. It seemed to make sense. Some kind of metaphysical interaction had occurred on the night that four-year-old me asked the holy spirit of God to look after me forever. Forever and ever and ever. I have this feeling I was being efficient. A shred of a memory tells me I thought I was praying once so I’d never have to pray again. But my mother, opportunist and recent convert that she was, saw eternal potential. “Do you want to ask Jesus into your heart?” she asked me sincerely. I did.

If I could go back to that tender night I would not change a thing. Children see where adults do not. They understand things we find obtuse. They believe, where we scoff. My conversation with God that night, aided by my mother, was the real thing. I wanted something more than this world had to offer. I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself. I wanted to believe.

I could look back on the years since then as one long loss. My simple four-year old faith was quickly tarnished. It wasn’t long before I was convinced I was right and everyone else wrong. I read the world through newly converted eyes. Even at four I had opinions about what Christians should do and shouldn’t. The day I found out that our closest church friends ate white bread, I was horrified. Christians ate brown bread! I was a prodigious fundamentalist.

You can fill in the gaps between four and fourteen, and fourteen and twenty-four. The desperate prayers for myself and the entire world. The missions trips. The youth groups. The compulsive bible reading. The conferences, the sermons, the mega-healers on TV. My heart was full to bursting, or so it felt. But my mind had checked out a long time ago.

I’m not here to recount the evils of organised religion. You know them all. I can’t even bring myself to hint at them; the horrors beggar belief. But I can tell you why, after all these years, I still go to church. I go to church because I like to go to church. I like to sit in the quiet of the one hundred and fifty year old stone building we worship in and think about my life. I like to look up at the rafters towering above me, and imagine the people all those years ago who put so much energy and resource into building something soaring and magnificent, something so impractical. I look up to the balcony floor and wonder what the days were like when most people went to church on a Sunday. When this old building was full and bursting with life. I think about the Reverend Wallis, a character in my novel, who preached in buildings just like this one, to a full house. And somehow, sitting in that building, partaking in the ritual and the community it offers me, my life makes sense. I go to church to understand.

I used to go to church for you. I thought that if I did the right things, and prayed the right prayers, that you would have your moment of transcendence too. I wanted you to be happy. I wanted you to be free. I wanted you to know that sweet indescribable feeling of being loved by something bigger than you. I wanted you to find something soaring, magnificent. I wanted you to know that you are beloved, end of story. I still do.

You are welcome to join me at church any time, but I’ll never invite you like I invited you before, all serious and hopeful. Every precept I once held, tightly as if it were a rock and I drowning in a sea of uncertainty, has crumbled. What’s left is beautiful. But it’s beautiful to me. I won’t presume you’d feel the same way. The children will probably want you to come and hear them sing in the choir, and I’d recommend it. The sound of their clear and steady voices pierces the still air, and above them the morning light streams in reliably through ancient glass in a myriad of colours. There’s nothing like it.

You see, I still want more than this world has to offer. That’s why I go to church. Not like before, when I was so unaware. I go like the new-born newly-adult self that I am, everything fresh and undone. It’s the best way I know to begin again.

this

I can’t tell you this without telling you a story. So here’s the story:  for almost as long as I can remember, I was given the message that being gay was not okay. The message came through loud and clear.

There was a man at church who used to be gay and was now happily married, thanks to an ex-gay support group. This was important information for me to know. My school friends’ suspect behaviour was eagerly identified. One wore aftershave as perfume; this was not approved. I sat at a dinner table for more than an hour listening to a group of church women gossip about one of the women’s gay sons. The tone of the conversation was superficially of concern but the stories his mother regaled us with were merely fodder for our curiosity.  We’ll pray for him, the women said, as I sat frozen. Any time the word homosexual was mentioned in church, or in books I read, I stiffened. Someone once, without asking my permission, decided that I needed the gay prayed away.

Somehow I made up my mind that if I hadn’t been brought up Christian, I would have been gay. I said it occasionally, in quiet tones, in private conversations with friends. I even said it once as a joke, and laughed. I don’t think anyone heard me.

And who would have heard me anyway? I was all about boys. Truthfully, anyone who knew me back in those dark old days could tell you that. I was desperate for love. And in a church community which idolised marriage, and having grown up without a Dad close at hand, I was yearning for love in the masculine form. I was also desperate to get on with my life, convinced that marriage was the ticket to success and approval.

But I never managed to procure a long-term boyfriend. My heart was always with my girlfriends. Boys were foreign, they spoke a completely different language, and as much as I appeared keen to learn it, in reality I was a lacklustre student.

I met Pat at the ripe old age of twenty-six. Plenty of my friends had got married already, I was one of the “spinsters,” or so I thought. He was sitting at a table in a café next to a friend of mine; I noticed him straight away. He made me laugh, was interested in things I was interested in. He rang me that same night and asked me out. We fell in love and were married eight months later.

I had no idea how much I needed to fight. I had no idea how much I needed to be put into a position where I had to fight for my life. It’s a truism to say that marriage takes work. But there are some marriages which, owing to the baggage the partners bring into the relationship and the unconscious lacks which spur their initial attraction, are hard work from the get-go. There is no shame for me in saying we had one of those. Most come to an end, or become one groundhog day of misery after another. The lucky few go to battle and come out the other side. The victory is sweet. The wounds are spoils of war.

The battle was my saving grace. Everything I failed to learn in childhood I learnt then. For the first time in my life I had to open my mouth and speak the truth. I learnt, over many grey and weary years, to put my needs into words, and then to go after them. I dragged myself out of the murky depths of compliance and passivity kicking and screaming. For the very first time in my life, I got angry.

Anger is a vital emotion. We can’t act without it. That I grew up with a profound inability to feel anger was a great abuse. It left me bereft of the fuel my introverted and compliant self needed to be able to speak up for myself.  I was incapable of agency or autonomy, completely unable to arrange the elements of my life in such a way as to benefit myself. I had what every abuse victim has in common; a complete and total lack of self-love.

I will spend the rest of my life living out the lessons I learnt in that battle. What I’ve said here barely scrapes the surface. But the most important lesson I learnt of all was to own my own mind. The battle forced me to discover, incrementally, what it meant to think for myself.

After that the world began to look different. Broader, wider, more sparkling. I systematically went through every belief I’d collected over the years, starting from the very beginning. What did I think? It was a thrilling process. And it’s probably obvious to you that my old ideas about being gay were some of the first to get the toss. All of sudden, being gay was actually ok. The ground shifted.

I’m bisexual, and I’ve known it for a while. I wish, like I’ve never wished for anything in my life, that I got to come out at a younger age. To explore what it means to follow my own natural attractions, uninhibited by dogma or social coercion. That’s not to say I have any regrets about the path my life has taken. There were lessons I had to learn, and this was the way I learnt them. And I have a family. A dear husband who loves me, and three daughters who are growing up in a very different world to the one I grew up in.

But I know what it’s like to love a woman, and I carry the memory of that love with me still. It is a sweet memory, and rich its own way. It leads me towards paths I have not yet taken. Paths that move me deeper into self-awareness, deeper into myself. I was sad for a while, wondering if I had missed out on something precious and irreplaceable. And then I realised, like I was Odysseus landing on home shores after a lifetime of journeying, that the woman I needed to love most was myself.