This month I have supported writers whose books reflect same gender relationships between women, as well as WOC authors. They have emphasized what it is like to grow up without characters who resembled them. Helen Corcoran wrote a blog about how she wrote a book about characters she needed to see as a child.
In this vein, I wanted to use this month to share my journey in self discovery and musings about any correlation with my reading or writing.
According to my mother, when I was three, I stated I wanted a bathing suit with darts for boobies. I had the most gender neutral room, painted yellow, since my parents did not opt to discover the gender of their first child. After two miscarriages, my mother required medical supervision to carry my brother to term, so his room was very blue. I did, however, have a doing grandmother and single aunt who loved to spoil me, and my German grandfather preferred to laugh at us when we fell down, so my brother was without that kind of focused attention. My father did not treat my brother and I any differently, and played sports with us both outside the house. I was the only girl enrolled on my youth team sports club. Overall, awkward is how I would describe my childhood. I was buliied and cried having to go to primary school, but I also bit a boy on the cheek on the playground. One of the boys who would later prank call my house claiming to be another boy in the class asking to be my boyfriend. It was not a convincing ruse considering after they thought the call was over, the two boys would laugh with each other about the prank.
I do remember when I was five asking my mother if I could marry my best friend who lived next to us, who was a girl, having no concept what marriage was apart from just spending every day with a person with whom I spent every day, for the rest of my life. My bother chuckled and tried to explain that was not how things worked. What was "normal" in my world? Being told I could do anything. Being a tomboy who climbed trees and played in the mud with my best friends who were girls. We played games about who we would marry some day, all among the neighborhood or school boys we knew.
At one of my first slumber parties at age 8 to 10, I was on the floor in a sleeping bag looking at the blond girl sleeping in front of me wanting to touch her. However, I had a crush on the boy at school who was my best friend because we were in advanced studies, and he did not tease me and treated me like a person. We had inside jokes, but I was teased for potentially having a crush on him or another boy who was our friend who looked like a young Nicholas Cage. Being attracted to boys has never spared me from being bullied or teased any more than being attracted to girls would have. I did not have a crush on any of my friends who were girls.
My life quickly turned into scenes from Mean Girls at a new school. I remembering lying when I was twelve that I was dating my old crush who was then at a different, rival school, just to avoid the questions. However, my home life was not easy, either. I do not know at what point the situation with my mother became more severe, and I cannot track degrees of emotional abuse, but it was clear when I went to University that what was there was something more than the usual wish to leave and outgrow your family home and parent relatoinships. Years later I would explore this in therapy, but even in my university years, older mentors would represent something very unhealthy about the situation with my mother. Now looking back, I could not talk about my romantic interests, feel for myself, whether attracted to either gender.
I was always attracted to men who were older and taller than me, who gave me a sense of security and protection. As a preteen, one was a friend through musical and sports interest at my schoolk, who was painfully shy himself. He and I met in a horrific scene during university, when my mother interjected herself into the conversation and dominated and killed it, leaving him and I with nothing to discuss or connect over. He is married now with two children, and he and I have laughed about how shy he was back then.
Then as a teen, I met a tall Irish golfer, but could not be pressured to call it more than a friendship because of the environment I was in, which did not allow me to have confidence or intimacy with anyone. When I was twelve, my father had made a wooden paddle for punishment. I was punished for "making my mother upset," as a wonderfully objective sense of correlation between crime and punishment that took - takes - years of undoing. One day, when he went to fetch his paddle, I retreated to my room, locking the door, which did not stop him. He broke the door frame, then as I tried to shielf myself from the blows with my hands, and fight back, he took my ankles and held them above my head so I was completely immobilized. The next day, looking at the deep purple marks on my wrists, I reached for the telephone and dailed the number of the school counselor. As it rang, shame overtook me, and I ended the call. My one chance to stand up for myself, and I failed myself. I failed to believe that it was not my fault, so a childhood of apologizing constantly for things I did not understand and though I deserved makes you numb, shuts you down from vulnerability.
Was I attracted to the Irish Golfer? I visited him at university his first year. We lay on his bed. My mother told me that I was never supposed to go in the bedroom of a boy. He hovered over me, and I felt the chemistry. Later when I tried to discuss it, feeling guilty for that as well, it went badly, and inadvertently put us in the friend zone, which had not been my intent. I wanted to be kissed. I wanted him to be romantic toward me, but you cannot believe those things for yourself as a child in the environment I have described, and that is a viscious cycle of shame always leading you into situation for which you are ashamed for wanting things you do not believe you deserve, further entrenching your feelings of low self worth. So my inability to express my desires led me to a party at twenty with older men around twenty five who drank alcohol, and I did not. One offered to take me for a walk by the lake, and the girl who wanted the boy to kiss her still wanted those things and feelings or being treated romantically, which was not at all what he had in mind.
In the middle of the assault when I was saying no and he was insisting I would like it, a few of the older men who would not have done that were calling for me, and it gave me a physical escape, but not an emotional one. On a retreat, I tried to discuss this with an older woman, who did nothing to help me deal with the shame. Could you have imagined how any conversation with my mother would have gone? There would never have been one, so there was no outlet for me there. Instead I threw myself into a codependent relationship with a guy at university to whom I was not attracted, who offered me no comfort or security, but talked with me about philosophy and took ballroom dance class with me, and took me to all of the dances, as "friends." All of our friends considered us to be dating, friends and a mentee looked up to our relationship. My mother met him at commencement and made sure to express her disapproval. Unlike the Italian athlete I had spent my first two years, who she approved as cute enough. That was another story of getting the guy all the girls wanted to date, but constantly missing connections to be anything more than friends, despite wanting that with him, and unable to express it.
That was my journey. Would having characters that demonstrated different gender or sexual orientation help me? Absolutely not. My brother partied and did drugs behind my parents back and had a fake id. I went to faith groups to seek faith answers for my misery, but my parents decided I was the child who was the trouble maker. In any other household in the world, what set of parents would consider a daughter who did not drink, did not party, and did not do drugs, and went to church and hung out with friends who did none of those things the rebellious child? Having characters in my books who represented different orientation would have done nothing to help solve my problems.
After university, I swore of dating, and was physically afraid to be in the same room with a man alone, for several years. I was harassed by a manager at work for years. Relocating, I would not have broken that cycle, either, if it had not been for a man. Providing live in care with a terminally ill woman, I was introduced to a bad boy, who everyone would have tried to steer me away from, except her. She encouraged me to let him help me get out of my shell. At that time, in my mid twenties, I was also approached for the first time by a couple who were involved in the swinging lifestyle, and was attracted to the wife but not the husband.
During university, I had seen one of my close friends question her sexual orientation and how the faith community responded to her. However, when I became entangled with a man through messy family connections which erupted chataclismically, it also created a love triangle and involved a faith community. I experienced something similar I had seen a friend of mine experience from a faith community when her fiance dropped her with no explanation, and created a narrative that she was mentally unstable, which the older men in the community backed up, that became exactly what I experienced. Rather than the man be to blame for the situation of choking when he saw me, but stringing her along, somehow it was my fault for getting in her way. Something was clear to me, that it did not matter which gender I was attracted to, that even if I tried to do things that looked right, I would always be wrong.
Those are topics we can write about in books. Those are topics that will help people. Those are topics I write about in my writing.
After my foray into dating someone who helped me come out of my shell, I entered into a horrific chapter where everything that had gone to shit was all my fault according to my overbearing mother, except the economy crashed, and so had my career and finances. All of that was what I had to crawl out from underneath to date people and look for my person to be a partner in life, and clearly not all men were equipped well for that. I dated men and women equally. I had my first girlfriend. I was in online discussion forums, because I was not going to be forced or pigeon holed into what that meant for me by anyone who were going to tell me who I was and behave as badly as all of the other people had in my life.
I remember going on my first date with a woman who had spoken to me on the phone and sounded cute. However, on the date she had no personality. I remember meeting an attractive older woman for drinks who spent the entire time venting about her ex girlfriend, which was a red flag for me. I remember the fiest red headed Irish girl with an accent so charming, I would have let her get away with anything, who after three dates and bringing me Indian takeout after being sick, I dropped by her flat with a pack of Magners told me she was getting back together with her ex gf who lived on the other side of the ocean. I remember having to prove to older lesbians that I was a lesbian and that I hadn't dated men. Finally, I met my ex girlfriend who had never dated a woman either, who still had a mindset that a relationship with a woman was less than a relationship with a man.
That is something we can change in the characters we write about.
That was a messy relationship, because she was with me when my mother became terminally ill, and even when I had to disentagle myself from her emotionally and romantically, I still needed her support as a friend, despite her attempts to win me back. She came to my birthday party, and I took her to explore a hole in the wall club afterward, and she tried to throw me against a wall and kiss me, which injured my wrist, and did not undo the injuries I had sustained during our romantic relationship. Women are not shown good healthy examples of healthy boundaries in relationships, and that is something we can change in the stories we write and publish. Those relationships are things same gender couples who are women need to see, not perpetuating the examples of married women who tried their relationships with women as inferior or secondary to their relationships with men.
That is my perspective on the correlation between my journey and what is represented in fiction being helpful or relevant.
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