Tag Archives: love
Muddle through somehow
Sometimes the universe decides to remind us that people have a tremendous capacity to love.
I mentioned, as part of yesterday’s post, some of the past and current difficulties I’ve had with some family members—specifically the ongoing sticking points of me being a gay man raised by a bunch of fundamentalist evangelicals. So, during my day trip to Mom’s and to visit at least some relatives near her, several people decided to tell me how much they love Michael.
Keep in mind that none of these relatives know this blog exists, and one of them can’t even “work the google” without the help of their 12-year-old… Continue reading Muddle through somehow
A holly, jolly time
Two years ago today…
The sweetest, sexiest, most capable man I know said “I do” with me…
Not forgotten
Then a couple of nurses turned off the monitors, removed the respirator tubes, and turned off the rest of the machines.
I held Ray’s hand, and said “Good-bye.”
I’d been crying off and on for hours—days, technically (though I’d only slept a couple hours out of the last few days, so it felt like one really long, horrible day).
I don’t remember if I cried again. My last chronologically-in-order memory is taking hold of his hand that one last time. My memories for the next few months are just fragments—bits and pieces of time scattered through a fog of bewilderment.
He promised me he would stay with me for the rest of his life. And he did.
Out! Out! Come out now!
Today is National Coming Out Day. If Ray were still alive, it would also be the day we’d be celebrating the twenty-first anniversary of our commitment ceremony (he promised to stay with me for the rest of his life, and he did).
Since I am still occasionally surprised to learn that someone I know or work with hasn’t figured out that I’m gay: my husband (Michael) and I are both men, and we’re very much in love with each other and happy together.
Trying to maintain
When we’d met, he’d been this tall, thin (skinny, really) grinning goofball with a mop of curly hair usually dyed in multiple colors. As his illness had destroyed his lung tissue and caused painful lesions to erupt on his bones, making movement ever more difficult and painful, he’d gained weight and lost all that manic energy. The chemo didn’t make all of his hair fall out, but it got very, very thin, and he hated how it looked. The pain had slaved his sleep schedule to his pain pills. During that last year he would take his pain pills, wait for them to kick in enough to let him sleep for a couple of hours, then wake up and try to occupy himself for about four hours until he could take his next dose, sleep for two more hours, wake up and wait, et cetera.
Powerless
Years ago a Catholic co-worker told me this joke: “You want to know the real meaning of Catholicism? Bad things happen to you because you are BAD!” I told her that my Southern Baptist upbringing had instilled the same lesson. Though the more I thought about it, I realized that the archetypical evangelical statement is more along the lines of, ‘Bad things happen to you because you’re bad. Bad things happen to me because god is testing me.’
Neither mindset is content to accept that a lot of bad things just happen.
The truth is, humans aren’t comfortable with that idea, no matter how skeptical and rational we may be. For instance, this morning I got a voice message from my husband informing me that he had been in an accident while he was riding his bicycle to work: he’d been hit by a car.
Never mind that he was well enough to operate the phone to tell me what had happened. Or that he was well enough to push his bike the rest of the way to work and would drop it off at the repair shop. I, of course, freaked out.
And as I was calling him to get more details than were in the voice mail and assure myself he was okay, one part of my brain was busy concocting things we should have done to prevent this. I didn’t, at that point, have any details of the accident, but that didn’t stop that corner of my brain from thinking, ‘Why did I let him ride his bike into work?’
There were other crazy voices in my head, too. He had kissed me good-bye when he left, but as usual I wasn’t really awake yet. I couldn’t remember what I had said to him as he left. Had I said anything at all? Or had I just grunted incoherently, laying there half asleep in bed, hoping I could snooze for a few more minutes before I had to actually get up?
Not that any of those things would have prevented the accident, but you have the thoughts, nonetheless.
And that wasn’t all. Another corner of my brain was mad at me for not hearing the phone ring when he called. Even worse, another piece was upset that I didn’t know, somehow, the moment the actual accident happened that it had. I should have felt something, right? You shouldn’t be able to just lay there, snoozing and listening to news on the clock radio, when the person you love is being hurt.
After talking to him, and being reassured many times that he was okay, the various parts of my brain had to keep arguing. The more rational parts tried to talk me down. If he didn’t ride his bike, he could still get hurt. How many times have I almost been hit by a car just walking to the nearest bus stop, for goodness sake? Just two weeks ago I and a bunch of other pedestrians almost got mowed down in the crosswalk 12 feet from my regular bus stop.
And how many times, while riding the bus or walking home, have I seen the car wrecks where at least one of the drivers or passengers in one of the cars had to be taken away in an ambulance?
And what about that time, years ago, when a whacko on a bus shot the bus driver while the bus was crossing a bridge, and the bus plunged off the bridge just a couple miles from our place?
We can’t make anything 100% safe. The rational part of me knows that. But we don’t want our loved ones to be hurt, so we still wish, and plan, and second guess. And some people pray, and other people make bargains with the universe, and other people refuse to think about it as if not thinking about it will prevent it from happening.
All we can do is take reasonable precautions, be aware, and try not to do things that endanger others. I know this. I understand it. I have to live with it.
But I don’t have to like it.
He’s my guy, and I love him
I have to be honest, here, and say it wasn’t love at first sight. He seemed like a really nice guy. I thought he was really good looking, that’s true. My late husband, Ray, was still alive then, and Ray commented (later, when we were cleaning up after the party) that “the new guy, the super shy one from Missouri? He’s cute. Too bad he’s straight.”
Because Michael had mentioned his girlfriend when he was introducing himself.
I didn’t see him again until the next NorWesCon. We here hosting a room party again. For whatever reason, that year the room party (our room parties were always more like a writers’ group or artists’ jam than a party—for one thing, we didn’t serve alcohol) was more crowded and busy. And the shy guy from Missouri showed up again… except he didn’t come off as shy that year. He’d grown his hair out, he was much more outgoing. And he managed to mention the fact that he worked as a bartender at a gay bar a couple times.
But the first thing he said to me when coming into the room was once again, “Hi! I’m Michael.”
A couple months later, a new season of the British science fiction comedy, Red Dwarf, premiered in the U.S. with marathons on PBS stations. Ray and I hosted a watching party, which we had announced on a couple of fannish e-mail lists. And once again, when I opened the door, I got that irresistible smile and he said, “Hi! I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Michael.”
That was the last time he introduced himself to me. He hung out at the party (which got pretty crowded), and since he’d taken a bus up to Seattle from Tacoma, and the party went a bit longer than he had anticipated, he wound up crashing on our couch. By the next day he and Ray had bonded as if they had been friends for years. We gave him a ride back to Tacoma after we found out how long the bus ride would be.
He and Ray started corresponding online after that. So several weeks later, on a Friday night when Ray picked me up after work because we were going to go out, Ray said, “I think we should drive to Tacoma and surprise Michael at work.” We had a great time hanging out and meeting the regulars at the small lesbian bar where Michael was a bartender.
It got to be a fairly regular thing, where Michael would take the bus to Seattle on a day off (which were usually in the middle of the week) and meet up with Ray, or we’d go to Tacoma to meet up with Michael. Ray had had his first round of chemotherapy by then, and was no longer working. I was grateful that someone was available to hang out with Ray at least some of the times when I was at work.
He was a great friend.
And then, not long after the second round of chemotherapy (the first one had appeared to help a lot, but it hadn’t gotten everything), Ray had a seizure in the middle of the night and fell into a coma. Michael wasn’t able to make it to Seattle before Ray died.
Michael was one of a rather vast group of people who helped me deal with the aftermath of Ray’s death.
I have another confession to make. I don’t remember when I fell in love with Michael. There’s a lot during that first few months after Ray died that is very fuzzy and confused for me. I remember Michael meeting me a couple of days before Christmas to give me a Christmas present and to tell me he hoped I managed to have a good holiday at my mom’s, even though I wasn’t in a holiday mood at all that year. One of my favorite pictures of Michael was taken that holiday season in my living room, next to the Christmas tree that I almost didn’t even put up (except I had a frantic moment where I became convinced that Ray would be upset at me if I didn’t put up at least a little bit of Christmas; which was followed by a bigger panic when I thought about digging into all our Christmas stuff in the basement because I knew I would start crying and never stop, so I bought new decorations that didn’t have any memories with Ray attached to them). I don’t remember that visit at all. For various reasons, I know I didn’t take the picture that time he came up just before Christmas, but I don’t recall the visit where I took his picture.
Somewhere during all that upheaval, I realized I had fallen for him. We had one awkward week where I thought that maybe he was spending so much time with me because he felt obligated because I was grieving, so I tried extra hard not to do anything that might be considered flirty or otherwise showing that kind of interest in him. And he took my sudden emotional reticence as a signal, and he worried that the earlier signs of interest had actually been because he was taking advantage of me when I was in a fragile state. So he tried extra hard just be be a friend and nothing more. Which I interpreted as a sign that he really was not at all interested. And so on, and so on. It was like the middle act of a romantic comedy for a bit there.
But eventually I asked him out on a date. And he said, “yes.”
It was soon enough after Ray’s death that I was more than a bit nervous about how some of my other friends would react to the news that I was dating someone already. I was incredible relieved when I told Kristin, and her reaction was to grin, make a little victory motion with her hands and say, “I hoped something like that was happening! He lights up whenever you come into the room!”
Sometime long after that, he overheard me explaining to someone why I never called him Mike. “Because every time he introduced himself to me, he said, ‘Hi! I’m Michael.'” He interrupted to say that wasn’t true. So the next several times I heard him answer the phone with, “Hello, this is Michael” or saw him introduce himself to someone at writers’ night or a convention committee meeting by saying, “I’m Michael” I would catch his eye and mouth silently, “Hi, I’m Michael.”
A lot has happened since first meeting him at a science fiction convention in 1996. I could go on and on with stories about what a wonderful man he is. I know that over that time, to the extent that I have become a better person, it’s because of Michael. He’s wonderful, smart, capable, kind, unselfish, funny, and constantly helping people. He laughs easily, and he always finds ways to make other people laugh or feel better. I often suspect that most of our friends only put up with me because my weird opinions and annoying quirks are a small price to pay compared to how awesome Michael is.
And I’m okay with that, because he is so darn awesome. And I’m not just saying it because it’s his birthday.
I have one more confession to make. When I started writing this post, I titled it, “He’s my guy.” But that isn’t true. I could never “have” a man as incredibly talented, sexy, warm, loving, kind, smart, giving, compassionate, practical, unwaveringly cheerful even when he’s being cynical, unselfish, funny, charitable, or just plain incredible as Michael.
He’s not mine. I’m his.
Happy Birthday, Michael. You deserve to have the happiest and most wonderful day all of the time, but especially today.
Connections, rainbow or otherwise
I’ve spent some time this morning crying at weddings more than a thousand miles away. I’ll likely spend a lot of time this weekend doing that. A federal judge ruled yesterday that Michigan’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional (given all the other rulings that isn’t much of a surprise).
The Court finds Sankaran’s testimony to be fully credible and gives it great weight. He testified convincingly that children being raised by same-sex couples have only one legal parent and are at risk of being placed in “legal limbo” if that parent dies or is incapacitated. Denying same-sex couples the ability to marry therefore has a manifestly harmful and destabilizing effecton such couples’ children.
The clerks in four counties, so far, have opened their offices on the weekend, to give out “no waiting period” marriage licenses. State and county officials have come in to work on their own time to facilitate the weddings. Judges, ministers, and other people legally authorized to perform the ceremonies have also come in to perform them. Ordinary citizens, some of them friends and families of the couples, but others just people who believe in equality, have come in to help, to congratulate, to cheer.
Couples who have been together over 50 years have been among the people married this morning.
My favorite part of this judge’s ruling (in his findings of fact—that will be very important during the appeals process), is his total evisceration of the notorious Regnerus study:
“The Court finds Regnerus’s testimony entirely unbelievable and not worthy of serious consideration. The evidence adduced at trial demonstrated that his 2012 ‘study’ was hastily concocted at the behest of a third-party funder, which found it ‘essential that the necessary data be gathered to settle the question in the forum of public debate about what kinds of family arrangement are best for society’ and which ‘was confident that the traditional understanding of marriage will be vindicated by this study.’ While Regnerus maintained that the funding source did not affect his impartiality as a researcher, the Court finds this testimony unbelievable. The funder clearly wanted a certain result, and Regnerus obliged. Whatever Regnerus may have found in this ‘study,’ he certainly cannot purport to have undertaken a scholarly research effort to compare the outcomes of children raised by same-sex couples with those of children raised by heterosexual couples. It is no wonder that the NFSS has been widely and severely criticized by other scholars, and that Regnerus’s own sociology department at the University of Texas has distanced itself from the NFSS in particular and Dr. Regnerus’s views in general.”
(You can read Judge Bernard Friedman’s entire ruling here.)
Except that this doesn’t show that, because none of the children in that group were actually raised by a pair of same-sex parents. None.
It is true that his study also included two children whose parents divorced and the custodial parent came out as lesbian. Those two children did spend part of their childhood being raised by their mother and her same sex partner. Regenerus was forced to admit under oath that these two children did better than average in school, and otherwise had “better outcomes” in all the areas he measured than the others.
So, the only children in his ‘study’ who actually were raised by a same sex couple were success stories, rather than the horror story he has claimed.
So far, every state that is defending bans against marriage equality has cited the Regenerus study, despite its having been debunked many times before this. As far as I can tell, this is the first time that a court has specifically gone into the reasons that they have not been persuaded by the study.
I’m going to go look at more wedding pictures. Pass me another box of kleenex.
Update: Alas, the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court has issue a stay at least until Wednesday, when they will hear arguments as to whether the stay should be permanent until the Appeals Court rules on the original case. It’s disappointing, though not entirely unexpected. I do have to re-ask the question of just what the attorney general requesting this stay hopes to accomplish? He can’t be so delusional as to think the the whole country is going to reverse course on this sometime soon, can he?
Font Folly 