Greetings From Janeland

by Candace Walsh

  Again I panic, but not like I’m giving a performance. More like I’m jumping off a cliff.

  Anxiety takes over as I become lost in an avalanche of questions. The obvious: How does this work with a woman? I’m thirty-five, is it even worth it? Does she feel it too? How do I even tell? The less obvious: What if she sees that I eat the same meal every night because my anorexia still stalks my every move? What if I reveal myself as the most boring person in the world? Someone who wants to spend Saturdays sleeping and writing and sitting silently for hours? What if I don’t have time to do my run every day because there are other things she wants to do together and I can’t say no?

  She scoots closer on her stool. Her hand touches mine, softly at first and I don’t pull away. Her fingers curl around mine on the sticky wooden bar.

  As she speaks, I see my web of habits as a different kind of padding. The padding you pile into a box to keep a prize safe. Padding that’s both necessary and useless depending on when and how you use it; indispensable until you get where you need to be, and then it’s just in the way, a messy pile of similar scraps. The more valued the prize, the denser the padding, the more there is to sweep away once you arrive.

  Strong Like Her

  BY STAR MCGILL-GOUDEY

  “FULL ON BODY TREMORS . . . MY KNEES BECAME SO WEAK I sank into his arms, stars spun in my head until my breath and his breath were one pulsing energy.” That is how my friend described kissing a boy. I didn’t feel anything like that when I kissed boys.

  I was clueless about my own biology, thanks to a sex education consisting of a church-approved stick-figure book and being told how sinful it was to feel what my body was supposed to be feeling if it didn’t happen within marriage. In Top Gun, when Kelly McGillis walked across the screen, I felt heat wrap across my body and make my brain fuzzy. Meanwhile, my friends felt the same way about Tom Cruise. Back at church on Sundays, I would hear about the evil homosexuals trying to take over the world. I pushed my feelings down. I had no one to talk to.

  Satan was calling me in the way my body was coming to life, in the way I felt for women. I knew that unless I could control my body, I was headed into an eternity of pain, and my family would be struck down to teach me lessons. I pleaded and prayed and bargained with God. I prayed to be possessed by a husband, by God, by Jesus, never knowing I was actually free to make my own path.

  At twenty-one, I joyfully stood at the front of my ancestral church. I thought I was marrying my best friend, that the feelings of heat and wild abandon for him would come within marriage and that we would live happily ever after. I didn’t see how much he was like my father. He joined the military and through our travels, I began to befriend people of all religious beliefs and sexual orientations. I had been taught people of different beliefs were evil, but I liked my new friends. They were great people. Normal. Happy. Even though they were sinners.

  Our nomadic lifestyle brought a new awareness that changed my perspective and introduced me to worlds I never imagined. But the real catalyst for change in me was my mother.

  My mother’s focus had always been on the wants and needs of others, never her own. As years passed, I watched her become despondent—my father was abusive to her and she worked all hours of the day and night to support our family. When I was an adult, she told me that she became so exhausted that she often thought of driving her car across the median of the busy highway—if only she could be certain she wouldn’t hurt anyone else in the process.

  When she first felt the lump she did nothing. Whatever it was, my mother was prepared to let it take her. Then I told her I was pregnant, and she rushed to the doctor, only to be told she had rapidly growing triple-negative breast cancer. She wanted to fight. She wanted to see her granddaughter grow. But it was too late. She died on my daughter’s second birthday after battling cancer with chemo, radiation, mastectomy, and drugs. This woman who cared so much for others did not value her own life. As the church taught her, she was only good because she was an obedient vessel (victim) letting Jesus work through her. She never knew she had anything else but that ancient book of oppression and horrors. That was the only book she let herself believe. My mother was deeply good and strong, but she never knew it, and she never knew the truth about me.

  When she was dying, my queer and atheist friends stood by me, without the judgment and trite words I would hear from family and church friends. My queer and atheist friends held space for me and loved me in a way I had never experienced. Some I had known since childhood, and others were friends I had met online in crunchy mom groups. I had always prayed for them to renounce their sins and be saved, and it was they who were saving me. When Mom died, my last thread to the church had been cut. What I had been taught no longer made sense. My repression was beginning to lift as I journaled and found a new freedom to look at myself openly. Now, anything was possible.

  Right around that time, my husband told me about childhood friends of ours: a man and a woman who were now married. She had realized she was bisexual, and they were exploring polyamory. This excited me in a way I never expected. I was thinking about women again, but this time, I was free to do so.

  I looked at online profiles, and met a woman for dinner. It was comfortable and sexy all at once. Her eyes held mine as we smiled and blushed a bit. Our hands brushed over the sushi we ordered, and I felt that long-lost heat wrap around me again. My body was coming alive, and I felt like the lights above the booth burned even more brightly because of my pulsating energy. We talked for hours, and then had to return to our husbands and kids. I pressed her close when we said goodnight. It was a chaste hug in public, but I could feel every curve pressed against me, the soft brush of her long hair against my cheek. I wanted to keep holding her.

  I went home and bawled. I was overcome with the thought of turning the shower on hot, and scrubbing my body with bleach and a Brillo pad as I wailed, crumpled into the shower floor. In the days that followed, I journaled, prayed to a God I didn’t believe in, ran miles until I was exhausted, drank, tried to get her off my mind. It was no use. She haunted me. I realized if I didn’t follow this through then I would never be okay again.

  Not long after, my husband and I went to our polyamorous friends’ house for dinner. It took me an entire evening of wine and hot-tub flirting before I got the nerve to tell the men to go inside for a bit and let me kiss her. She was wearing a bikini and the water was lifting her breasts up so that the moonlight was high-lighting each curve and sway. Her apple-cider-smelling perfume was intoxicating. She was talking to me as she moved closer, about what I don’t know—all I could feel was an electric charge between us that made me tremble. I touched her skin, watching my fingers trace lines on her arm and shoulder, watching her breath catch. She was still trying to talk in faltering words as I slid my hands into the hot, bubbling water and around her waist. I could feel her breath on my neck as I pulled her close. My brain froze, the only words I could speak were “Shut up and kiss me,” and she dove to my lips, pressing hers hard into mine. I could taste lip gloss, the champagne; could feel her breasts and mine pressed together, her tongue sliding against my lips, my tongue. I could feel how soft and hard she was all at the same time, how I wanted to tumble into that softness. The world set to spinning and we pressed closer.

  That first kiss left me with the knowledge of myself and my love of women—and it left me mad drunk with the need for more.

  After that, my husband and I decided to try polyamory. I think we saw it as the solution to our problems. It was only fair, right? We read Opening Up and hoped to become acquainted with a suitable couple. A very attractive woman contacted me through a secret group on Facebook, after seeing some burlesque photos that I posted. We texted and flirted before we met a week later for dinner.

  She had me so turned on before I even left the house; I was intoxicated by her pictures and her unabashedly sexual texts. We went to their house after dinner for drinks and conversation that led to much more on many nights to come. I
loved to run my hand through her hair, smell the perfume at the base of her neck, slide my hands across her cheek, across her lip. Loved to hear her speak my name. She had seen and wanted me, that’s what I thought. But it turned out she had fallen in love with my husband and he with her. They had been seeing each other before this setup. I was crushed.

  Within months, my marriage was over. I began to live my life on my terms. I went to counseling, learned about conscious parenting. I applied for an apartment on campus as a single mom, went to school, and worked part time. When my daughter was with her father, I dated men and women, always being honest about dating others and often being met with far less than honesty in return. After the poly experience with my ex-husband, honesty was the most important thing to me.

  I met a singer with red hair and an amazing body. One summer night I watched her on stage. Her eyes burned into me as she sang, and I knew each twist of her hip was for me. After her set, she pressed into me at the bar. Her dress skimmed every curve. I slipped an ice cube out of my drink and pressed it to her throat, slid it down her neck, across her bare shoulder, my hand moving up her thigh. She quivered and pressed farther into me, turned to kiss me, ice dripping over us both. Every eye in the club was watching us. We were safe here. She wasn’t out and everywhere else we went, we had to be discreet. A hand on a leg under a table. Stolen kisses in the car. We would talk for hours and meet for lunches; she became my best friend. I wanted more than poly from her. I played with her husband just to have more time with her. Their rules dictated that she never was able to spend time with me alone. But I had inhaled her. She was in my bloodstream. This was breaking my heart, and eventually, I had to let her go.

  When I was married, I thought sex would solve everything. Now I had all these sexual experiences ranging from the passionate to tepid, and I was still hollow. Most of the women I dated were bisexual, poly, and married. Some would date me just in the hopes of a threesome, and they only pretended to care. How I felt often did not matter. I knew I needed someone who understood and valued all of me and did not exploit me. I realized that gender didn’t matter. I wanted the one who saw my soul and wanted more. The journey companion. My best friend for life. Whose touch ignited me inside and out. Someone honest, someone I could trust. Home. Passion. Fire. Future. Family. I was searching. And with each person I was with, I lost more hope and died a little more within myself.

  Oddly enough, I found love when a friend introduced me to her ex-husband. We talked and texted for weeks. I met him for the first time at his home, after getting lost in a cornfield. I pulled up in his driveway and laid eyes on my future husband for the first time. He had light hair, broad shoulders, strong arms, and he carried himself with hypnotizing confidence. My heart quickened and I was too nervous to get out. I waited. He leaned into the window and smiled. Welcomed me to his home. An English mastiff and labs crowded around his feet. I could tell they liked him, respected him, trusted him. He opened my door for me and I found my feet. He looked me up and down and smiled. His blue eyes burned into mine and took my breath. I was home. He blew my mind and my body wide open with more passion, tenderness, love, and respect than I ever knew possible.

  I am now happily married to him, and yet I crave women at times. It caused deep guilt for a while. Why couldn’t I be normal and monogamous? It was the church creeping in again. It seems it’s never completely gone. My husband knew before he met me, and he told me he would never try to change me and make me miserable. I have no desire to sneak around. We have met couples and have had some fun evenings living our mutual fantasies, and I am free to find a girlfriend if I would like. It’s hard to find women who are bisexual and who interest me in this very rural conservative region. Very few are out. Many are purely swingers who want sex and casual friends at best. I want more than casual sex. I don’t know when or if I will meet another girlfriend. I am okay with that. I am okay with me.

  I love myself now. It’s been excruciating and exhausting to wade through everything I have been taught, all the abuse, traditions, and expectations that surrounded me, to find who I am. To give up on the ridiculous idea of being normal. Like my mother, I thought about suicide many times, but my daughter kept me going, and I am too much of a fighter to give up. I have walked through nights so deep and dark that every breath cut canyons through my skin and fear ripped at my heels. Arms wrapped tightly around my knees, rocking back and forth and wailing from places I never knew existed inside. I wish I could go back and tell myself and my mother: You will walk through this, dear one. You will find yourself. Never give up. You are not alone.

  The Flipping of the Switch

  BY M. E. TUDOR

  I THINK WATCHING THE 1996 20/20 INTERVIEW WITH Melissa Etheridge and her partner, Julie Cypher, was what flipped the light switch in my closet. The way the two of them looked at each other made me realize I was missing something. That night, I had the most vivid dream about having sex with another woman, a dream so strong that I woke up wondering where the woman had gone. This, of course, pleased my husband, Kelly, to no end. He had been trying to talk me into having sex with a woman while he watched for almost all thirteen years of our marriage.

  At the time, we were living with our two young daughters in Montrose, California, a very small city in the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. I had always tried to be the perfect wife. My parents fought all the time. I hoped that if I did everything my husband asked of me, then I would have a happy life. We’d met as teenagers and married young. We had a lot of happy times, but things had changed. Kelly had changed. He’d always been demanding and sexually driven, but he’d wanted me to do things I didn’t feel comfortable doing. When I didn’t do what he wanted, I felt useless and stupid.

  A few months later we moved to the much larger city of Colorado Springs, and my husband intensified his demands that I find a woman with whom to have sex. Just about every night he wanted me to tell him about the dream again and describe it. He sent me to a lesbian bar one night to try to pick someone up, but I couldn’t stand the thought of asking any of the women in the bar if they would go home with me.

  I have to admit that after the dream I was intrigued by the idea. There were several women in the bar that I wouldn’t have minded getting to know, but I felt dirty even thinking about asking them to let my husband watch us. When that didn’t work, he said that he’d seen personal ads in one of the local papers and he wanted me to answer one of them.

  I answered a personal ad placed in a small community paper by a woman looking for a bi-curious woman. I was surprised when the woman (I’ll call her Jane) called me. She sounded very nice, and we made arrangements to meet at the park downtown the next day. She was very pretty with long red hair and big blue eyes. I was immediately attracted to her. We talked for over an hour and made arrangements to have dinner that evening. My husband was invited, but he declined, saying he would stay home with our two daughters. The plan was that I would just meet with her and her boyfriend and talk and nothing else.

  When I got to the house, she greeted me at the door. Her boyfriend said hello but then left the two of us alone. After a few minutes of polite conversation, she asked me if I wanted to kiss her. I kissed her tentatively, but the fire between us soon ignited and before I knew it we were in her bed. From the moment we kissed, all my fear about not knowing what to do left me. I knew exactly what I wanted to do to her and I did it. It was the most amazing sexual experience, up to that point, in my life. I left their home completely elated and certain we would meet again.

  When I returned home, Kelly was waiting for me. I told him that I’d had sex with the woman without him there; that it had just happened. I figured, from the tenor of our conversations, that he would want to hear about it. I thought he would be happy I had sex with her. But he was not. He was furious. That night, we had the worst fight of our marriage. He was certain I’d slept with her and her boyfriend, which I had not. Her boyfriend tried to join us, but I had drawn the line with him because I knew Kell
y would be pissed if I slept with him.

  Nevertheless, Kelly told me he was going to leave me, and then came back and demanded I tell him if I still loved him. Angry, I said I didn’t love him anymore. But after I spoke the words, I realized they were truer than I ever realized. So marked the beginning of two horrible years.

  Jane called me a few days later. She and her boyfriend had enjoyed my company and wanted me to come over again. I told her that my husband’s feelings about the situation had changed, and that I wouldn’t be able to see her. She was very understanding.

  Soon after, we moved from Colorado to Kentucky. We weren’t there six months before Kelly wanted to move again, to Florida. Kelly was a drywall hanger and finisher. We were constantly going back and forth between living close to family in Indiana and Kentucky, and going where the money was in Florida and Colorado.

  Earlier in our marriage, I found moving frequently to be a lot of fun. I’d grown up in a very small town in western Indiana and my parents led boring lives, other than their violent fights. I met Kelly when I was sixteen and he was eighteen. He was very self-assured and had big dreams. I just knew he would take me away from my mundane life in Indiana, and he did. I’d grown up in a home where my father controlled everything, so marrying a man similar to my father hadn’t been a huge stretch for me. I have always been mild-mannered and allowed Kelly to rule over me. I thought that was the way it was supposed to be.

  Things became more and more strained between my husband and me. The verbal and emotional abuse that had been a constant in our marriage became more vicious. He became rougher and more demanding during sex. He made me feel like I owed it to him because I’d had sex with a woman and he didn’t get to watch.