Marriage

I have gotten into the bad habit of reading old e-mails and/or surfing the web after S. goes to bed. I had planned for the one or two hours between my bedtime and hers to be my writing time—at least, when I didn’t have extra work that needed to get done. I haven't sent anything out for publication in over a year, and I’ve yet to return to the novel-in-progress--but I am finally writing poetry again, which feels good. Anyway, I digress...

Tonight was a web-surfing night—I couldn’t get my head clear enough to write, partly because my daughter refused to go to bed until she'd talked to her boyfriend. The house has thin walls, and I confess I have a hard time tuning out her phone conversations. So, although I tried to surf the web, really I ended up listening to one of many conversations that are always part heartbreaking, part hilarious, and part frustrating. For instance, today’s went like this:

P! Are you listening?
P!
What kind of wedding do you want, formal or semi-formal. P! P! Are you listening? What are you doing? Well, stop watching T. V. and listen!
I’m talking about our wedding, P! Who else's? Listen to me. What kind of wedding do you want, formal or semi-formal?
I'm talking about our wedding. Listen, P!

OK, I’ll stop there, but you get the picture.

S. recently cut off contact with her foster family—though I suspect this won’t be forever—after learning the truth about how they really felt about her. (This is a long story for another entry). Most of the time, she is happy to be here, and can recognize the incredible progress she’s made. But she’s not quite ready to completely separate herself from her past, and the way this manifests is through a one-sided relationship with a boy named P.

Well, maybe it’s not completely one-sided. I wouldn’t know; she tried to arrange twice for us to meet during my pre-adoption visits, and both times, he chickened out of showing up, or his family made the decision for him—or something.

Based on the conversations I overhear, he is as immature, if not more so, than she is. He's also an abuse survivor, and an adoptee, though he was adopted by a relative. S’s former therapist told me he was kind to her, able to calm her down, and that he did at least briefly consider her his girlfriend—though S. herself admits they only kissed on the lips a handful of times, and that she enjoyed it more than he did.

Sometimes, S. says she wants to marry him at 18 and start having babies--and becomes outraged when I explain why I don't think this is necessarily the best plan. Whether he has this vision—or thinks of her as a girlfriend at all now—is questionable. There were a series of conversations about the status of their relationship—yes, you can date other people, no, you can’t, etc.—and now, S. insists they’ve come to some kind of agreement to stay together forever, something I can’t verify, of course.

There was, however, the letter her wrote her, one sentence: “Have faith.” It may have meant "have faith that we will be together," or "have faith that your life will work out," or—most likely, he doesn’t even know what it meant. It was a response to a long, heartbreaking letter from S. begging him to be more engaged in their conversations, more attentive to his future. He sent her letter back with these two words, scrawled in giant letters on the letter’s reverse. Talk about cryptic--but it was enough to convince her that a wedding, babies, etc. were in her future.

When she’s not talking about marriage and babies, she’s talking about college, career options, waiting to have kids. Or else she’s talking about becoming a famous singer, and how P. will follow her everywhere and sometimes sing duets with her. The dog is also in this fantasy, and I’ve been told that if she ever gets that rich, she’ll buy me a mansion. The next day, she’s back to looking up colleges with horse programs on the internet, talking about what it would take to have a career working with horses, saying, “My good grades are definitely the first step, right, Mom?”

There seems to be no rhyme or reason to whether she is talking realistically or unrealistically about the future. I have noticed, though, that after a particular success she will often regress--return to fantasy talk, go from calling P. once or twice in a week to insisting on calling him every day. I am still negotiating how to limit their conversations—which are clearly not as interesting or important to him as to her—without making her feel as if I’m cutting her last lifeline to the past. Unlike her other fantasies/unrealistic stories, I am unable to give her a reality check because I don’t have a firm grasp of the reality.

So anyway, I was clicking through old e-mails, the mass-mail ones that I get at work, decide to read later, and usually end up deleting months afterwards, unread--and listening to this wedding conversation, frustrated beyond belief. "Why does this girl who is doing so well right now—who has lots of concrete, positive things going on in her life—feel like it’s to her benefit to spend time having a one-sided conversation about how formal her wedding will be to someone who has never showed any interest, as far as I can tell, in marrying her?" I asked myself as I clicked on yet another unopened e-mail.

And there it was—the photo that woke me up. There in the center of my screen were two old women—very old women, there's no better way to say it—getting married. The headline read, “Marriage in California.”

Now, I’d written the obligatory letters, made the obligatory calls—even with S. in my life, I’m able to stay politically active to this extent at least. I vaguely knew the California measure had passed, and of course I thought this was good news—but something about the photo made this reality concrete in a way that completely surprised me.

Without any warning, I was sobbing. It was sudden and fierce, but there was something so raw and beautiful about the photo—how the woman on the right, the one with white hair, leaned forward, her smiling cheeks a sea of wrinkles, her eyes straining to see her partner. Their hands clasped together. Her partner, lips pressed together, eyes closed, weeping. The witnesses were weeping, too—two middle-aged women whose identities, like those of the marrying couple, are not revealed on the site. The minister, a young man, smiled ear to ear, a little awkwardly.

S. came down then, saying something annoying like, “Well, you can’t stop true love, it always means long conversations. P. and I were planning our wed....”, and then, she saw my face. She sat down beside me, read the screen. “I want to see more,” she said, and so I kept clicking. We watched a video of a stream of couples walking through the courthouse door, old, disabled, young, together for 12 years, 18, 40—and I kept weeping.

“It’s so beautiful,” Lisa said, and that would have been enough, but she went on. “I don’t understand how anyone could hate you, Mom,” she added, kissing my head.

“They’ll try to take it away,” I heard myself say. Immediately, I regretted it. I’m trying to raise a hopeless kid into a hopeful life—and here I am, already thinking ahead to the inevitable barrage of hatred that will follow this moment.

“Have faith, Mom,” S. said. “They’d better not, or I’ll kick them in the balls.” But I didn’t hear the second sentence; instead, I saw her boyfriend’s messy, giant letters scrawled across the bottom of the letter she’d written him, which he’d sent back: have faith.

For whatever reason, I understood something then as I hadn’t earlier—that S’s need to stay connected to P. has everything to do with faith. She wants to believe she can change her life without fundamentally changing who she is. A part of her is proud of how she’s matured in the last three months—another part of her is terrified. She's terrified because when she thinks back to the Boys and Girls Club, where she spent most of her time because her foster family agreed to keep her only on this condition, and where she and P. met, she remembers having one other outsider who truly cared for her there, one other person her age who understood, more or less, what she had been through. It was a good feeling, but it's in the past--and she can’t connect the person she is now with the person she was then.

This is, of course, a terrible comparison, but I know the feeling. My life has changed drastically multiple times, and occasionally, I feel this pull toward the past, this need to reconnect with friends who have long since left my life or to talk with someone who “knew me then,” even if she doesn’t know me now. It’s why I had an inexplicable urge to call my ex, with whom I barely speak, the week I was going to meet S. for the first time—I didn’t do it, but the urge was there. Unlike S, though, who is able to convince herself that a one-sided conversation is actually a positive sign, I knew any conversation I initiated would have ended with me disappointed, sad--something a 14-year-old girl can't be expected to understand.

Even now, years later, when I see the photos of those couples getting married, finally, legally, after so many years, I am partly weeping for joy, partly for what I know I could have had if I'd been willing to stick it out--but I wasn't. And for good reason, let me add--I would not have been happy.

But these couples are--truly, undeniably happy. This is all S. wants, really, some kind of assurance that the future will be secure for her, that she'll be loved.

"I said I'll kick them in the balls if they try to take it away," S. repeated, clearly wanting to make me laugh, and the second time, I did.

"Explain how it works again," S. said, "how gay people can be married in a church but not really. How does that work?" I explained the difference between a church wedding and a legal wedding--and all the privileges that go along with it.

"It's so unfair," S. said. "I'll kick 'em in the balls," she repeated.

“Kicking them in the balls won’t help,” I said. “But there are other ways. We can write letters...”

“I know, Mom,” she interrupted me, rolling her eyes. “It was a metaphor.”

And immediately, for some inexplicable reason, I saw my own handwriting at age 14, scrawled on a tiny piece of paper I’d taped to the side of my bed, read every night—a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, then my favorite poet:

To a Young Poet

Time cannot break
the bird's wing from the bird.
Bird and wing together,
go down, one feather.
No thing that ever flew,
not the lark, not you,
can die as others do.

When I was 14, I instinctively understood the bird metaphor--I wanted, like S., desperately to fly, to feel the rush of wind in my wings, but also, I wanted my life to matter. My vision may have been different than hers--I wanted my writing to change people's lives the way Millay's had changed mine--but is that really any less selfish than wanting a big wedding, to be loved completely in the fairy-tale way by the first boy who ever showed you a little kindness? OK, maybe it is less selfish--but considering that all S. has ever wanted or needed is to be loved--considering that the idea of making an impact wasn't even in her frame of reference until recently, as she was focused primarily up until this point on survival--her desire is really the foster-care-kid version of mine.

S. leaned over me then and pressed "replay" on one of the U-Tube videos we'd watched. There they were again, all of those couples walking into the courthouse, joyful, grateful, changed. I wept again, and S. rubbed my back and said, "It's OK, Mom. It's real."

My daughter may not always have a concrete sense of what is real and what is not, but in that moment, she was so, so right.

Healing

It was April 2002, the last day of GLBT Pride week at the college where I teach. We gathered as usual for a celebration potluck at the home of my friend, who co-advises the GLBTA organization. We were tired but joyful--proud of the excellent work the students had done to bring nationally-known speakers and performers to campus. As twilight began to fall, the students left in small groups, planning their weekends. I remember telling them to be safe and, jokingly, saying “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“That shouldn’t restrict us to too much,” one of them joked back.

I have a picture in my mind of us sitting in that circle; I can still hear the deep laughter of one of the co-chairs, Jen, and see another member, Dustin, running his fingers through his hair as he paused dramatically during a funny story. In this picture, they are innocent, untouched by anything hateful or harmful, proud of who they are, and safe.

I can see the big prairie sky turning from blue to pink to blue-black as the students trickled out the front door.

I wasn’t there later that night when Jen, Dustin, and Dustin’s boyfriend decided they were too tired to go out and chose instead to go to the local grocery store to rent a movie. I wasn’t there to hear their laughter in the car, and yet, I can hear it—Dustin’s a little higher than a typical guy’s laugh, the earthy, deep, short giggle in Jen’s throat. I don’t know what movie they were looking for, but maybe that’s what they talked about as they rolled out of the car, Dustin’s hand in his boyfriend’s, oblivious to any sideways glances of the teenagers parked at the McDonald’s, one of the local teen hangouts in our small town, which shares a parking lot with the grocery. Or maybe they were still talking about Pride week, the giant flag they’d unrolled on the student center’s outside wall, the image of the campus’ chancellor dangling from the end of the rope when the flag stubbornly refused to fall.

Whatever it was they were talking about, according to the interview records, they didn’t hear the high school kids by the magazine rack, who were making comments about the men’s linked hands and the quick kiss Dustin gave his boyfriend after he made a joke. They did hear the reprimand of a community member named Katie, who told the kids to get lost, get over it, mind their own business. She talked to Jen, Dustin, and his boyfriend after, explaining what had been said, what she’d said back. This did not faze them.

And then they rented the movie, got into their car, and drove away. It didn’t take long to figure out they were being followed. A car pulled up beside them, windows down (it was, as I recall, a mild April, nothing like this year’s snowy one), the boys inside shouting words like “buttfucker” and “faggot.” They shouted for Jen, Dustin, and his boyfriend to “get out of our straight town.”

The three of them, unnerved, drove back to campus and parked their car. By then, the other car seemed to have disappeared, and for a moment they felt safe again, even laughed it off. Then, as they were crossing the street to get back to their dorm, the car sped up and drove toward them as if in an attempt to run them over.

This was the first of a series of hate crimes aimed at the GLBT community in our small town. It was also, for me, the one with the most impact. (I have written about it before in this blog). On the positive side, it was the first time the mayor, police force, and Human Rights Commission got together to discuss how to make the community safer for GLBT people. On the negative side, a spiral of silence began to surround the boys, and they were never caught—even though the police are certain of at least one of their identities, nearly certain of the other’s. Parents refused interviews, kids at the high school said they didn’t want to get anyone in trouble. Eventually, the case was closed.

Both of our student victims were gone within a year. Neither finished college. And this week, one of them, who now lives in LA, came back to find some closure.

It was good to see her. She’d had a rough run of it over the last six years, but is now doing incredibly well. She looked the same, except that she could make eye contact and was a little more maturely dressed (though, as my daughter pointed out, still very fashionable) and clearly much more confident.

We had some good, long talks. She got to meet my daughter. She got copies of the records, including more than 10 interviews with high school kids and their parents. She discovered one of the boys admitted to doing the yelling but was never charged with harassment because the police believed the driver, whom he would not name, had committed the “only criminal act,” as a good-natured, well-meaning police officer explained to us when we met with him in the giant, 70’s-style atrocity that is our police building and courthouse.

Later, on my home computer, we looked up the harassment law and realized he could have been charged. I felt like I’d been a terrible advocate, missing such an obvious point. But it is now too late to file charges: even if the records did not contain black permanent marker slashes over the last name of every interviewee, six years have passed, and according to law, a civil case must be brought within six years.

As night fell on her last day here, Jen, my daughter and I went to the grocery store where the crime had begun. We stood silently in front of the movies.

“It’s just a store,” Jen said, but she was clearly unnerved. She said she wanted to walk around the store for awhile, to try to remember some of the good things that had happened there. “I don’t want my only memory of this place to be that night,” she said. My daughter and I waited—and waited. After awhile, I got scared—where was Jen, what had happened? A few nearly impossible scenarios flew into my mind—someone had recognized her, maybe some of those boys-turned-men were in the store again. But then, she was back, saying she was ready to drive away.

We drove the same way they had driven that night, in silence, down the small access road that goes from the store to the main road, past Subway, past the cemetery. But when we got to the turn—the place where the car had pulled up beside them, where the boys had screamed their hateful words—the road was blocked.

“I can’t help but think this is a sign,” I said into the silence, which my daughter was prayerfully respecting. Nobody responded. I circled back another way, around the campus, past the horse barn, past the baseball courts, eventually landing in the same space where, according to the records Jen had received, they had parked that night.

School is out, and the lot was empty. We got out and walked toward the road. “Here’s where it happened, where we crossed,” Jen said, and we paused while she lit a candle and put it on the ground. “Everything looks different,” she said. “I thought we’d run up a hill to get to the dorm, but there’s no hill, just a tiny embankment.” She turned to me. “Did they do something here?” she asked, and I shook my head.

Memory is faulty when it comes to details. When I remember the home of my childhood, the room where my mother died, for instance, it is giant in my memory, the red-orange carpet searingly bright. When I went to that same room the day my father was moving out after losing everything he owned, I saw an empty, too-white, tiny space; it was hard to imagine my mother’s hospital bed had ever fit there.

Of course, just as the loss of my mother is deeply imprinted in my heart, even if the room’s details are lost to me, what happened to Jen that night, the feelings she had, will be with her forever. That is how trauma works—memories fade into imagined spaces too large to hold the details (small embankments become hills we struggled to climb; small rooms become spaces giant and bright enough to contain a mother’s death), but emotions remain.

My friend put a flower on the road next to the candle. She read a beautiful poem she’d written about the innocent, idealistic young woman who had died that night inside her, and how she was now reclaiming her, how she would take her with her when she left.

“What happened to the girl?” my daughter asked, confused by the poem.

“Nothing,” I said firmly. “She’s still alive, inside Jen.” My friend nodded.

Then I spoke about the joy and idealism of that afternoon, the pure wonder of finishing a successful pride week, of celebrating who we are. I spoke of how proud I was of my friend, and my daughter, for their willingness to move forward, to find ways to effect change in the world despite the trauma they have experienced.

We all looked up at the road, imagining the car waiting on the corner for Jen and her friends to cross the street, the calculation involved in that act. I imagined Jen just hours before that car turned the corner, remembered her deep laugh, her eyes looking directly into mine, her political resolve to make this town a better place for everyone.

Then I thought of her the next time I saw her, clearly broken, unable to look me, or anyone, in the eye. She is bright and was an excellent student, but it has taken her years to find her way back to what others would call a “normal” life. She still hasn’t finished college, though she’s thinking now of going back. Dustin, too, faced several years in an abusive relationship and other hardships, but, like Jen, he is heroically getting his life back on track (he recently reconnected with me via e-mail).

Both of them truly believe they almost died that night. The fear is palpable in the interview transcripts that happened a week later, when the police asked them, over and over, if they were still afraid. Yes, they answered again and again. Yes.

In one of the interviews, one of the boys who admitted to being the car but would not reveal the identity of the driver responded, when asked if he’d been trying to kill anyone, “No. If we had wanted to kill them, we wouldn’t have done it in the middle of town.”

A chilling sentence, when one considers the death of Matthew Shepherd in 1998. Then again, more recently, Lawrence King was murdered in his own high school—apparently high school boys have moved from dragging their victims to the outskirts of town to pulling out guns in their middle school computer labs when they feel threatened by another person’s sexual orientation.

I kept staring at that corner, but I couldn’t imagine the car turning toward us. I breathed in deeply. We were safe. The road was quiet; there were orange blockades blocking our view of the place the boys had turned. “We had to come back here by another road, because we’re different people,” I said. “And we’re going to leave here by another road, too, because after this ceremony, we aren’t who we were the last time we came.”

I wanted to say again that I was sorry—sorry I hadn’t done more to push the county attorney to press charges, sorry I hadn’t done more to help Jen, and Dustin, stay in school. But that night, I also forgave myself for everything I hadn’t done. Now that I’m a parent, I am even more aware of my own failures—how I so often fail to live as lovingly or heroically or thoughtfully as I want to live, how I so often don’t show as much compassion as I want to show—but I am learning, too, to say I am sorry, and then to move on.

What is harder if I’m also even more aware of the power of words and actions to hurt as well as to heal. But I have to forgive myself, as well as those who hurt me, and move forward.

It is hard to collectively forgive those who hate us enough to want to hurt us, but Jen and I and my daughter did our best that night.