Dear John, I Love Jane

by Candace Walsh;Laura Andre

  CANDACE: These are not love stories with templates that are delivered to girls from Walt Disney, these are not women who found their princes. We are told, in this book, that we can keep our whole selves and still find love. Or it finds us. We are awakened with a kiss, a look, a job interview, or a “non-date.” Something in our destinies rips us out of what’s comfortable, expected, and rubber-stamped. We are given a choice. Will we follow bliss? Or hunker down and live a conciliatory lie?

  I was hungry for a story that didn’t make me suspect, or a liar, that didn’t cast a third of my life into the “mistake” or “do-over” category. I found my tribe. Like many of the women in this book, I hold my children close, close enough to model an example of authenticity while also feeling moments of uncertainty and even anxiety (isn’t that an indication that I’m not sleepwalking through life?). My children love my partner ardently. I have expanded their definition of what love looks like. Recently, my five-year-old son saw my Valentine’s Day present for Laura, wrapped in pink tissue paper. “Who’s that for?” he asked. “That’s for Laura,” I said. “Oh, good,” he replied.

  LAURA: Recently Candace told me that she was glad I never doubted her. The truth is, I didn’t ever question her commitment to finding a woman to fulfill her, regardless of the fact that she once identified as straight. I knew what she gave up. One doesn’t walk away from full-blown heterosexual privilege on a whim. It surprised me how many of the essays in the book refer to people who were suspicious that a woman who once loved a man could never love a woman as fully. That she must be experimenting, playing around, not serious.

  The whole idea that women leaving men for women is some sort of a trendy, hot thing to do is patronizing and dismissive. This book is not about BFFs frenching in bars to turn on their boyfriends. Especially in today’s climate, which is still—despite much progress—patently homophobic.

  CANDACE: And downright punishing, when you know what you’re missing. The women in this book once benefited from heterosexual privilege. We had the married income tax status, the pensions waiting for us, the right to be at our beloved’s bedside in the hospital. The frosty-white wedding albums filled with unequivocally supportive friends and relatives. We walked away.

  LAURA: As Jennifer Baumgardner notes in the epilogue to this book, women taking charge of their sexual identity is a specifically feminist gesture, one that is sure to ruffle a few conservatives’ feathers. But the truly immoral thing is to deny one’s real identity, whether it has been simmering for years or it’s newly sprung. I admire the women in this book so much, as they’re really brave to have done what they’ve done, and then write about it so honestly.

  One of the funny things about dating Candace is how, at the beginning, she was more out than I was in public. I’ve always been a lesbian, but I was used to being very low-key in public. And here she comes along, fresh from the hetero fold, wanting to hold hands, call me “honey,” and give me little kisses in public, and I stiffened up, which I feel bad about. I think those experiences opened both of our eyes to how heterosexual privilege operates in terms of public displays of affection. Many of the writers in the book express dismay that they don’t feel comfortable holding hands with their female partners in public—that simple, spontaneous gestures like that are something they miss from their previous relationships with men.

  CANDACE: Women who come out in their thirties or forties have a lot in common with high school girls coming out today into an environment that’s comparatively accepting. They may have a lack of self-consciousness about holding hands or being affectionate in public, which reveals evidence about the nature of their relationship.

  I noticed the awareness of a growing reflexive restraint, and felt it to be a damming up, a hemming in, of the flow of my romantic impulses. I am not a neuroscientist, but that can’t be preferable to the kind of freedom and safety heterosexual couples take for granted.

  LAURA: Another thing that was a big shocker for me was getting used to the kids. I thought I had chosen a life without children, and I was content with that. Falling in love with Candace not only meant having to confront my fear of children; it also meant letting go of my life as I thought it would look like. So, while I never left a man for a woman, I did have to switch my identity to someone who finds herself at children’s music recitals and ice skating lessons, and that made me more empathetic to the “Oh my God, I can’t believe this is my life” emotion that so many of our writers express.

  But as a result, my definition of family has expanded and I’m getting to experience what it means to love and be loved by two amazing children. Many of the essays in this book express a similar salient joy in having it all work out (including new partners who take the kid thing on with a ton of grace and enthusiasm), despite what seem like insurmountable challenges.

  It also meant having a third adult figure—the kids’ dad—in the “family.” I must say it is sometimes strange to be hanging out with Candace’s ex-husband. But then again, that’s very lesbian of us, to be friends with our exes. There are quite a few essayists in the book who have managed to preserve good relationships with their ex-husbands or former male partners. After the crisis and fallout, it seems that it’s worth it for many women who’ve left men for women to hang on to the parts of those relationships that they can salvage. In fact, a few of the writers are still married to their husbands, still trying to rework their concept of marriage to absorb their newfound identities.

  CANDACE: My ex-husband and I are active coparents to our two children. As a result, we probably talk more than we did when we were married—because instead of floating along on autopilot, we’re negotiating who’s picking up the kids from school Thursday, where the snow pants are, and how we’re going to swing music lessons. I’m glad that we have an open and honest dialogue. We’re much more authentic with each other now that we aren’t invested in preserving something that was so fragile. It’s meaningful to have continuity with a person I’ve known for a decade. And our children benefit from sensing warmth between the two adults who brought them into this world.

  LAURA: This is more than a book of essays by women who’ve left men for women. I’ve come to think of it as a massive coming-out story, written collectively by a group of women who’ve finally found their voices.

  CANDACE: Their stories diverge from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, gold star, accepted, “pure lesbian” narrative (example: “As a girl I was a tomboy . . . I didn’t date in high school and had Teen Beat posters of Nancy McKeon in a secret scrapbook”).

  LAURA: Women have always left men for other women, it’s just that now enough barriers have fallen, enough taboos have been smashed, for them to be able to tell their stories and share their struggles as a matter of course. In these twenty-seven essays, you’ll find stories from women who have always known they were different, but tried to make a go at the straight life, earning the approval of society and their families, but betraying themselves in the process. You’ll also find your fair share of essays by women who were hit over the head with their sexuality when they least expected it, or even wanted it. These women, who always considered themselves straight, had to deal with the cataclysmic revelation that they fell in love with someone of the same sex. And while coming out to friends, family, and strangers is hard enough, coming out to one’s self is the most difficult and powerful step of all.

  While some of the writers found great relief in finally identifying as lesbian—and shouting it from the rooftops, so to speak—others eschewed that and any other label, preferring to think of themselves and their identity without having to name it. Naming is such a powerful political tool for both empowering and marginalizing people; it’s easy to see how one might choose carefully in selecting or refusing labels.

  CANDACE: Especially after spending a lifetime unfettered by such categorization.

  LAURA: What it comes down to in these essays, however, is love. Having the freedom to follow and express love is the single uniting he
art of these essays. Despite the obstacles and deterrents, these women found, as Katherine Briccetti writes in her essay, “the pull toward bliss was too great.”

  Undoing Everything

  Erin Mantz

  I had prepared myself for the Saturdaynight couples’ dinner invitations to stop arriving, for the Evites to moms’ nights out to end. I braced myself to be unofficially banned from the most powerful PTA committees, to be shunned at the neighborhood pool club and shut out of family barbeques hosted by my sons’ friends’ parents. I dreamed of longtime friends literally turning their back on me, and my closest thirtysomething friends shaking their heads in disgrace and walking away. At the grocery store and in the gym, people would turn and stare, I thought, and say “She was married to a guy but now she’s with a woman. She must be insane!”

  And then it happened: nothing. At least, not to my face. Not yet.

  Falling in love with a woman at thirty-nine may have turned my life upside down, but the friends and family all around me are still standing.

  When your life is tightly wrapped up with a bow before you turn forty, the thought of unraveling it on purpose is almost impossible to comprehend. Your name is on a mortgage for a nice suburban home. You have a husband of eleven years, two sons, an SUV, and a community where lots of people know your name. You get lost in day-to-day plans of playdates and Disney vacation dreams, and pound on the granite kitchen countertops trying to decide what to throw together for dinner. You’re a lot like everyone else. You fit in. That was me.

  I was just another person in line for a latte at the neighborhood Starbucks.

  Then I fell in love with a woman. I was shocked and I was immediately absolute. I wanted to be with her for the rest of my life. And for a brief moment, I would think, there’s too much to undo.

  Trendy it is, women falling in love with other women for the first time in their lives. A short while after it happened to me, the topic was hot on Oprah and in various magazines. I never set out to be a trendsetter, had never identified with “Girls Gone Wild” or set out to shock people (though I admit the shock factor has been rather fun). I just wanted to be happy. I wanted to be with the person I realized I loved, who happened to be a woman. I didn’t want to have to undo everything. But I began to.

  As I broke the news to my friends near and far, in order of emotionally closest and those perceived to be most loyal, I went through a kind of steeling of my soul each night before the conversations. I’d wake up several times in the middle of the night and feel a kind of panic and a sense of resolve at the same time. During the days, I felt like I was floating through a foreign world or acting in a Lifetime movie, because what was happening was so unexpected, so crazy, so senseless, so selfish, that I didn’t even know how to articulate it. “I just love her,” I said.

  And they simply said, “As long as you’re happy.” A few bold ones asked, “How did this happen?” (Good question. I had no idea. It just happened. My therapist suggested a great answer after this question arose more and more: “Say ‘I have no idea,’” she urged. “Because you don’t!”) “I don’t know,” with a smile, a shrug, and a raise of the eyebrow became my well-rehearsed reaction. It was actually something I could laugh about later, as I recounted conversation after conversation to my girlfriend.

  Every person I told hung in there. They hung on my every word as I broke the news. Many thought they’d heard wrong when I said a woman’s name. I’d have to repeat myself and watch as their eyes got big as saucers. Some said, “It’s 2009!” to kind of justify it. But every single friend who stood by me—and I mean every single one did—said, “As long as you’re happy, that’s what matters. You seem happy.”

  I had, undoubtedly and tremendously, underestimated my friends’ ability to deal with my news. I had been getting ready for the disgust and discrimination, which I knew would come from strangers, and which I had anticipated from friends. But I was the one who was reeling and changing. They were staying the same.

  I was still their friend. But I didn’t feel like myself as I unraveled my marriage and everything that came along with it. Facebook connections with old boyfriends became reassurances of the old me—something, I guess, I’m still looking for. I searched profile pictures of old boyfriends—one particularly good-looking one from college, who I once thought I could have married—and tried to analyze everything. Was I the same person then? Am I still me? If I saw him today, would I feel anything? Would I have anyway?

  For all the statements I heard while breaking the news to friends, the one that hit me hardest was something I had never stopped to face. “Aren’t you scared?” one asked me. Of course I was scared. I had been terrified for months and months. I was still terrified. But it never stopped me from moving forward. I didn’t let it get to me every day. That night, however, her question replayed in my mind, and I had a moment thinking Oh my G-d. This really is scary. Am I really making this choice?

  But I found my soul mate. I had always felt something was missing from my life. Never, ever, did I think I would find it. I hadn’t even known what I was looking for.

  I’m in love with a woman, but so many little things haven’t changed. I still go to work and walk my dog. I try to go running three times a week and eat better, and I worry about my kids getting sick. I take my kids to the park and run out of milk just like everybody else. I received two Evites from other moms in my community last week. I didn’t have to undo everything!

  But, the big things are coming undone. Big vacations and lofty retirement goals as I’d envisioned them, and a chance to give my young sons a “normal” life—I’ve let all that go. A sense of place in the world I knew and the ease of being just like everybody else is gone now. And, amazingly, I am living with that, because the rewards of really being in love make it all worthwhile. It isn’t even a contest.

  The weight of the big things feels like a thousand rocks on my shoulders some days. But nobody can really relate to those moments of panic and awe, except my girlfriend, who is carrying the same. But, here’s the reality: Undoing everything isn’t something that happens at once. It will be reflected in random moments, not just this year, but always, and it’s something I can’t anticipate or complete. I am living with an enormous bet that what I’m getting will be so much more than what I’m giving up. Yet, I will never ever really know, will I? Living with that—that’s going to be the hard part.

  Running from the Paper Eye

  Susan White

  My mother’s hatred for her sister goes back to the chicken: an Easter chick dyed cotton-candy blue. My mother told me this story to squash my fondness for my aunt, Big Joan.

  Under the oppressive Tennessee sun, the two girls in their homemade white dresses spent the afternoon in their backyard playing with their chicks. Probably because she handled it too much—and because of the chemicals saturating its miniature body—Joan’s green chick swooned into death before supper. After the burial behind the swing set, Joan stood on top of the rust-red picnic table glaring down at my mother’s chick, Lucy, who pecked each speck on the smooth, cement sidewalk. My mom squatted by the screen door, calling Lucy to her. The chick cocked its head, shrugged its wing nubs, and waddled toward my mother. Joan jumped from the table. The bones popped and crunched. Thick darkness leaked from the blue beneath Joan’s new Sunday shoes.

  So what came before the chicken? An egg. And then a zygote. And then a child. But then another child. And they are sisters, right? Same last name, dark hair, nose, and accent.

  But, according to my mother, they had nothing but differences on the inside. She insists that Joan ruined her childhood. My mom learned not to count her chicks, lest they be flattened beneath Joan’s fierce feet.

  When I was old enough to know that parents cry and lie, I asked Joan how she remembered the Easter deaths. She claimed the unfortunate blue chick’s demise was an accident. With a brash smoker’s laugh, she said, “Your mother is the victim in all her stories.” She stood, running her hands down her
linen pants. “And I’m always the villain.” Winking at me, she added, “Some people need a villain.”

  I admire Joan’s certainty. Her swaggering speech. She was, after all, a high school basketball star in the ’50s who sported a flat top. Now she is a retired personnel director of the Arlington school system. She hatched no children. She is what no one talked about until I came right out and asked: a lesbian.

  I thought I was a boy the first few years of my life. Born between brothers, I wore my hair short, played shirtless and shoeless in the neighborhood, and tried to pee standing up. My mother called me to the Formica kitchen table, showed me a picture book, and gave me an anatomy lesson. I believed she cast a spell on me with strange, magical words to turn me into a girl that day. But at that age, I begged my mom to leave my sandwich whole, believing I would have less if she cut it. My larva brain saw the world in cartoon terms. A few weeks earlier, I had attempted to release all the characters inside by dropping a large rock on the malfunctioning TV left in our yard. After epic battles of forcing party dresses over my head, my mother eventually convinced me I was born a female. Years later, another female was born into our family.

  Easter came before my sister. The night before the first ovulating moon of spring, my swollen mother hid eggs around our front yard. The next morning, three eager kids grabbed the baskets filled with green plastic grass that lay waiting for us on the living room floor. We ran down the unswept stone steps into our yard, which was littered with dyed eggshells and chocolate wrappers. Our dogs had found the hidden treasures first. A couple of days later, one of those dogs, a chow-shepherd mix with a half-black tongue, killed the rabbit our uncle gave us. Slung it around and snapped its neck. It was a limp Easter.