Greetings From Janeland

by Candace Walsh

  The only time I felt truly sexy, without guilt or fear, was when I was trying to get pregnant. And once I was pregnant, large and oval and out in the open, I felt an incredible kind of power as men looked at me on the street and I knew they knew I had had sex—and that I’d done it without shame—because here was the proof, in my body, that it was the right kind of sex, that I was a good girl.

  When I became pregnant with my daughter, it was discovered that I have a heart-shaped uterus. The baby’s body develops in the womb of the mother through folding and unfolding until becoming whole—this is why we are mostly symmetrical, with two arms, two legs, two nostrils, two ears.

  In most cases, the uterus starts out in the fetus as a heart-shaped organ and widens into an oval. Mine didn’t. So my daughter, from 20 weeks of gestation, had her head stuck in the upper right curve of my heart-shaped uterus.

  What this meant, according to the laws of my state, was that I couldn’t have a natural birth with a midwife but had to schedule a C-section. I tried everything I could to turn the baby—acupuncture, moxibustion, massage, visualization, hand stands in a pool, legs up the wall —but I decided not to have a doctor try to move her manually. This could have resulted in a sudden onset of labor or damage to the baby or me.

  The surgeon used the laparoscopy scar to open me and take out the baby—a wide-mouthed, vernix-laden, beautiful daughter.

  So now the scar was a little wider. A little deeper. And once again, it hurt.

  The baby was ten months old and I was taking aerobics classes when I approached the instructor shyly.

  The scar’s placement had cut the muscles of my abdomen so I had a little C-section pouch that hung over my pubic area, and despite months of sit-ups and crunches, it wouldn’t go away.

  The aerobics instructor was a perky southern blonde who weighed about ninety-five pounds. But I knew she had children. So I asked her advice on tightening the belly.

  “Oh, honey,” she said. “Do what I did. Get a tummy tuck.”

  I walked away and went to pick up my daughter from the child-care room, blinking back tears, remembering the words of the surgeon during my post C-section appointment when I tried to complain about the way the belly flopped down.

  “Your baby has a cute, floppy belly,” he said. “Now you do, too.”

  I was pissed. I felt like the patriarchy had come in and knifed me in the belly and here I was, trying to get rid of the belly, but resentful that the solution I was being offered was another knife and another surgeon.

  I went home and ate a pint of ice cream on the kitchen floor with my daughter.

  Over the course of my sixteen-year marriage, I gained eighty pounds. When I look back at early pictures of us together now, it’s not my youth that strikes me. It’s how thin I am.

  Part of the reason I gained the weight was because I became a wife. I cooked dinner and bought the groceries—on a budget of $400 a month, which he deposited for me in a joint checking account. I shopped first at home the way a financial counselor taught me to do, looking in the fridge and cabinets for what was already there, using that to create a meal plan for the week; then I made a list; then I shopped at the cheapest places, splurging only occasionally, like when we were having a dinner party.

  I was a good wife.

  But I would admittedly squirrel away food only for me. Chips. Chocolate. Beer. Pizza for late-night binges after everyone was asleep. I did most of my eating in bed while my husband worked in his study. I was in the dark. Alone.

  The true end of my marriage began months before I fell in love with a woman. It was Thanksgiving of the year before that I decided to go on the Virgin Diet. I eliminated wheat, dairy, soy, corn, peanuts, sugar, and artificial sweetener—which was meant to halt the inflammation caused by food intolerances, reset my taste buds, and rewire the way my body responded to food. I began to feel lighter. I grew tolerant of the feeling of hunger. I began to feel the life in the fruits and vegetables I ate. My body began to feel awake.

  My body began to feel good.

  Twenty-three years later, that Irish Catholic man is still my friend.

  In a Facebook message to him after I came out, I wrote: “Always before, with men, I felt that the desire was a bridge to what I truly wanted, which was love. Now I know that when the love comes first and bursts forth in overwhelming acceptance and kindness, the desire springs from that. That’s the difference. That’s how I know I am gay and this is me and truly right for my life.”

  Just as you cannot fully savor the crunch of a salad when your mouth is still reeling from the salt and fullness of a bag of vinegar potato chips, I did not know what desire was when I was with men. Yet as I kissed Susanne, as I moved my hands over the soft plane of her hips, as I felt her enter me, wetter than I had ever been, I realized that the moves I made with men in bed were always a kind of performance.

  Move this limb. Feel that. Close your eyes and let yourself be washed away. Focus. Go far away, into a fantasy. Always this motion between mind and body—always this separation between the doing and the desiring—leading up to a point. The point of his entering. The point of his coming. The impossible point of orgasm without some help from my own hand.

  Performance and transaction. For the journey was not as important as the destination and end result. The ring. The calmness he felt afterwards. The closeness. The baby. The dinner out so I didn’t have to cook. The help folding the laundry.

  The other day, while driving home from getting groceries, I heard Mary Chapin Carpenter’s song, “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her,” and burst into tears. Although I had owned the CD and listened to it during my marriage, I had not really understood the song. Until I left, I never saw how hard I was trying to be good.

  The homemade meals. The laundry. The seasonal porch decorations. The Christmas cards. The mopping. The gardening. The school pickup. The flowers at the center of the table.

  Sitting in the driveway of the house I now own with my wife, I thought back to those years of being good, and I mourned my own failure. It felt like being a captive and then realizing you had the key all along.

  Because the truth is I really did want to be a good wife and mother. I really did enjoy making the house into a loving home. I really did take pride in meals cooked mindfully and laundry folded carefully. I still do—even now, married to a woman.

  So what is the difference between my former desire to be good, which eventually felt stifling and injurious to my spirit, and my enjoyment of my current life, which, from the outside, has me doing many of the very same actions each day?

  In poet Mary Oliver’s most recent book of essays, Upstream, she writes about what she calls “the third self.” There is the child self (the inner, emotional part of ourselves), and the social self (the one concerned with time and food and social arrangements), and then there’s a third self for the artist. She encourages readers to ignore the first two selves so that the creative work can get done.

  The problem is that this isn’t an option for mothers.

  Especially mothers who want to be good.

  As mothers, we raise all three selves in our children, and this means we can put our own creative desires on a back burner. Or burn them up so completely that the fire alarm goes off. When we are not getting the emotional support we need, we will forego nurturing our third selves in order to keep the first and second selves fed as we tend to our children.

  And the anti-mothering rhetoric of certain feminisms is not a solution either, for most women would say that mothering brings them the greatest joy of their life—exactly because it is work—the work of serving and nurturing.

  I am still a wife and still a mother. But my new marriage is one of serving and nurturing and supporting the third self in both of us, equally. Marriage that has an unequal level of nurturing for that third self will end up as performance and transaction. It is the third self of our creative, philosophical, and spiritual beings, woven into the social and economic necessities of existence, that will
sustain both individuals and the marriage itself.

  When I was pregnant, everyone knew I had had sex. Yet I was untouchable. What was the point? I was already pregnant. No man could give me what I already possessed within myself.

  I loved it. The combination of visible sexuality and protection. The power of being a creating body yet beyond the objectifying gaze.

  The first time I left the house in my newly unpregnant body without the baby, I felt cold and empty, once again at the mercy of the gaze of men who either admired or ignored me. I was an object again to be conquered or critiqued.

  And then when I came out, I became pregnant with myself. Those men who knew I was a lesbian looked at me, and I did not look away. Yes, I have had sex. Yes, I have made choices that allow me to have sex that I enjoy. And no, I do not need you for that.

  I was no longer an object. I became a creating and desiring body as I had been when I was pregnant. But this time, it was myself I was holding within me. Myself I was birthing. Myself I finally saw as good. Myself I was eating to feed and grow and nurture and please.

  I had never felt so free.

  Many heterosexual women still live under performative and transactional conditions of desire—in their bodies, in their hungers—where food and sex are connected to money. The truth is that at some level, that obstetrician was right when he told me I would have to learn to love my cute, floppy belly. Because while we can and should respond to heterosexual objectification, rape culture, and gendered structures of economic inequality with rage and blame, this is, I have come to see, only a necessary part of the process toward waking to our own true desire and power. The next steps lead us to loving ourselves and our bellies, our scars, our wounds, and our histories.

  I know now what it feels like to make love without wanting something in return. And I know now what it means to prepare and eat a meal without feeling like I am working to earn my keep.

  Until I made love with Susanne, I had no idea what desire was. It was like I did not know how to eat until I let myself feel hunger. I am not sure if I would have discovered this about my own desire if I had stayed with men.

  When Susanne’s body is next to mine and the only exchange between us is something equal—from our mouths, from our lips—it is as if I am finally having a conversation after being a student in a class for all my life.

  I no longer have to raise my hand. I no longer must complete the assignment. I will no longer be graded. I no longer have to listen to lectures—long and boring and dull.

  Because with each word that I utter and each sentence that I write, I feel myself growing lighter. I no longer fear famine. I am comfortable with hunger. I no longer live under scarcity. I am full, and I have more than enough. There is more than enough in myself and in the community I am helping to create. In my mind and body, belly and heart, I am finally good.

  In Defense of Family

  BY CARLA SAMETH

  AFTER I SPLIT UP WITH MY BABY’S DAD WHEN MY SON WAS eight months old, I decided I really preferred women. I used to think that attraction was more about the individual than about his or her gender. But while I hadn’t put myself in the path of many lesbians, I’d felt this attraction since I was eleven years old. I had my first girl experience with my best friend in high school after sharing a bottle of Southern Comfort.

  When my son, Raphael, was about five years old, I tried to have another baby as a single mom. I got inseminated with donor sperm and became pregnant, but I miscarried. I’d had many miscarriages prior to having my son, and I realized that I could no longer afford to abuse my body and finances the way I did to get my first and only child. But I’d always thought we were meant to be part of a bigger family: more kids, another adult, a couple of dogs—or at least a cat. Instead, it was just the two of us and a leopard gecko named Michael Jordan. I was ready to consider adopting. I began to imagine that it would be nice to adopt a girl. But there was something else: I was lonely.

  When Raphael was in the first grade, I told him that a woman can be in love with a woman and a man can be in love with a man—and that I was gay. Like most boys in first grade, Raphael preferred the company of other boys; he loved the idea that he and his best friend could get married someday. However, he insisted that I wasn’t really a lesbian since I didn’t have a girlfriend. So I stopped shopping around for sperm and began searching dating sites for a woman.

  A year later, when I told Raphael that my friend had become my girlfriend, he was thrilled. He couldn’t wait to announce this to the world, beginning with my mom. “Hey Gaga, did you know my mom is a lesbian?”

  “Well, I guess I did hear something like that,” she told him. He proceeded to spread the happy news to all the guests at a large family gathering. Raphael had already met my girlfriend’s daughter, who was the same age as him, and we all got along like a chorus of a lesbian “We Are the World,” Jewish, Cuban, Mexican, African-American between us.

  “My mom is getting married, and I’m going to have another mom and a sister,” Raphael announced to his best friend on an after-school trip in second grade.

  “No, you’re not,” the boy said. “Women can’t marry women. She must be marrying a man!” His friend was indignant. When the argument became heated, they deferred to the van driver, who told them that although two women could fall in love, they couldn’t, in fact, get married.

  In pursuit of a more progressive education for my son, I transferred him to a charter school in Altadena, largely African American and Latino, with more nontraditional families and biracial kids, like Raphael. There, a student told Raphael, “You’re not really Black—look in the mirror.” Suddenly, my son wanted more than anything to be accepted by a small group of African-American kids whose families were evangelical and vehemently anti-gay. But when Raphael eagerly told them about his “rainbow” family, his classmates were not accepting.

  His fourth-grade classmate wagged her finger and shook her head. “What you’re doing at home is your business, but you can’t be bringing that two-mamas stuff here to school!”

  That was the same year Raphael started to become aware of contradictions and hypocrisy outside of school. He asked, “If Senator Kerry supports gay people, why is he against gay marriage?”

  The parents of an adopted child suggested that the school present the movie That’s a Family, a sweet film depicting all kinds of parents: single, adoptive, interracial, and, of course, same-sex. A small but vocal minority of parents rallied to stop the screening of the film, and in some misguided show of cultural sensitivity, the administration canceled it. Raphael said, “Mom, it’s not the kids. It’s what their parents are telling them.”

  A class from Pitzer College made a documentary about our embattled progressive charter school and the difficulty it was having trying to address homophobia head-on. Raphael had become increasingly aware that not everyone appreciated his blended LGBT family, even though many of his classmates did not live with their traditional nuclear families due to circumstances such as divorce, addiction, or incarceration. But he asked me to let it go so he could just fade into the fray as best he could.

  Raphael decided to start remaining quiet about his home situation whenever possible. My girlfriend and I got married in Canada, a public acknowledgement of the blending of our families. The wedding was an important statement to our children—welcoming each of them into our new, combined family unit. We had a family honeymoon on Rosie’s Cruise, a boat full of other gay couples and their kids. Raphael said it was a relief to be in a place where he did not have to explain his family.

  In a pre-Cosby-scandal world, Raphael wished nothing more than to live in a family like the Huxtables with full siblings and two married, middle-class African-American parents. He struggled in school and in sports and wanted to be like his Black classmates, who played football, got good grades, and lived in “intact” heterosexual families. Being a disorganized, dreamy, awkward Jewish and African American boy with a stepsister and a lesbian mother and stepmom did no
t win him any points. And a couple years down the line, unfortunately, our blended family unblended.

  About five years later, as reflected in the Supreme Court’s decision June 26, 2013, the majority of Americans had shifted toward support of same-sex marriage. In that time, Raphael had grown from a self-conscious preteen to a seventeen year old who called himself an Afro-Jew and was at ease with having a lesbian mother.

  By 2013, Raphael had posted as his Facebook status, “Don’t hide behind the Constitution or the Bible. If you’re against gay marriage, just be honest. Put a scarlet ‘H’ on your shirt and say ‘I’m a homophobe!’” A short debate followed among his friends, with the majority liking his post.

  When he was younger, the message Raphael heard in his school was that having a lesbian mom was worse than being sold for crack by a straight mom. And society’s disapproval was echoed in the laws that discriminated against gay marriage.

  But it would also have been illegal for me to marry Raphael’s father prior to 1967, when the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that state bans on interracial marriage violated the Constitution.

  In his senior year of high school, Raphael said, “Mom, I’m pretty sure I’m 90% straight.” He went on to say that if Ryan Gosling came around, though, he’d be all in. “I can just imagine his strong, muscular arms wrapped around me,” he explained. Then he posted this on Facebook. Responses from other boys were mostly rude comments and derogatory terms for homosexuals, but his female friends posted that those guys just weren’t as evolved as Raphael. Many young people today seem to embrace the idea of sexual fluidity a lot better than my generation did. I didn’t identify as bisexual. Instead, I used to say I was a lesbian in a series of straight relationships.

  I recently got married for the third (and hopefully last) time. My wife is in the Coast Guard, but she had left because of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” when someone was close to telling on her. The trauma of secrecy—and always watching her back—hasn’t entirely left her, but she rejoined the Coast Guard after DADT was repealed, and she got through boot camp for the second time in her late thirties.