Baja Vacation

Monday was our four-year-seven-month anniversary. We are in Baja on vacation visiting Cher’s parents and having some time together. Four years and five months ago we were here as well—newly together and basking in the delight of our new romance. It’s wonderful to report that we still delight in our romance and although life is busy and sometimes gets in the way, these times together certainly help us to stay connected and remember how much we love each other and how much our relationship means.

I want it to always be that way.

I will do whatever I possibly can to keep it that way.

I arrived in Baja on Saturday, bringing with me seven novels and my Spanish textbook. I believe I may have been a little bit ambitious in thinking that I will get all of those books read—and accomplish the other things I want to do, like write for myself and study Spanish. Looking through my Spanish textbook this morning and realizing everything I’ve forgotten over the past nine months, I’m definitely re-thinking skipping 103 and going right to 201. I don’t have a lot of confidence that I will be able to self teach myself four chapters, but until I review the first six chapters, I’ll reserve making a decision.

I’m reading “The Book Thief,” a story about a young girl growing up in Nazi Germany.  The story is narrated by Death and he tells the reader about this young girl, Liesel, who is sent to live with a foster family. On their way to the foster family, her brother dies on the train and she is haunted by his death and his burial in the snow. During the burial, she sees a book, left by the gravedigger, and she steals it. This is the first of many books she steals. Each theft is taking her a step on her journey and her tale of living under Hitler, stealing food and harboring a Jew in their basement.

Death is busy in the book—seeing how there is a war going on.

Death also visited us yesterday.

Cher and her mom found an abandoned kitten and had been taking care of it. I arrived on Saturday and assumed my caretaking role as well. The kitten seemed to be doing okay and Sunday morning I took her out of her kennel and washed her up. Cher made her a bottle, which she didn’t drink much of. We offered her some wet food, which she ate right away. When she finished, she was washing her paws and seemed to be okay. Suddenly she got very lethargic and I knew something was wrong. Cher thought she was just tired and told me to put her to bed. I waited for a couple of hours and got her up and tried to feed her again. She wouldn’t eat. It only took a couple of hours and she was weak and withering away. We drove to the vet, but they were both closed. I knew on the way home that she was dying.

Cher held her and watched her draw her final breaths, each one a little further apart from the last until she was gone.

I was overcome with sadness. This little tiny life that we were trying to save, just slipped away and there was nothing we could do. We could only sit with her in our hands and watch her struggle to breath and then slip away.

I take comfort in knowing that she died warm and being held and loved instead of cold and alone, maybe being eaten by ants or other bugs. If it weren’t for us trying to save her, no one would have cared for that little being. No tears would have been shed and no one and nothing would have given her even a passing thought.

Even a little tiny life matters. Watching a little tiny life fade away reminds me how precious it all is and to value even the little parts of life that we may otherwise not consider. It’s all around us—we have to just take a moment and notice.

So thank you wee small kitten for letting me care for you for a short time and give you a little bit of love and comfort as your energy passed to somewhere different. Perhaps Death scooped up your soul and carried you away. If so, I have a feeling he held you just as sweetly as we did.

Four

Four years ago I walked into a crowded Starbucks in Lake Oswego, Oregon to meet a girl for coffee. I didn’t know it then but my life was about to change.

Back then, I never would have seen myself here. This is what makes life exciting, delightful and magical–the unknown of what is to come. I couldn’t have seen what was around the corner and I still can’t but it is my wish to always have Cher by my side along the way.

Four years ago I met someone who would change my life, all for the better.

Four years ago I entered into the something that I was waiting for all my life.

Four years ago my heart and soul opened up to a new understanding and awareness.

Four years ago.

Happy Anniversary Cher! I love you more with every breath I take!

So far, so good.

I’m a college student again and I made a decision to not kill myself and drop one of my classes. I originally registered for 16 credits and dropped to 12, which is still full time and still rather respectable considering all of the other obligations and responsibilities I have going on.

Obligations like the fact that my mother will get sprung from the hospital this weekend and she’ll be coming home with us until she can take care of herself. Right now she is still on massive amounts of narcotics that blissfully flow into her bloodstream courtesy of a PICC line into her chest. She pushes a button and magic happens for her. The other day she told her nurse that she thought that she was in England. “But no one has a British accent,” she said. I’m not sure why she thought that she was in England, especially since she’s never been to England.

Diladid=Travel.

My middle daughter fractured her radius, (that’s in your wrist area apparently.) Just one more thing added to the mix but at least the injury relieves me from taking her to volleyball and derby practice for two weeks. I think once my mother is here, I’ll be grateful for that–Not that I’m glad my daughter broke a bone, because I’m not and I’m dedicated to increasing the calcium intake of my girls as to prevent further breaks in the future. I’m conscientious that way.

And my father friended me on Facebook.

When will it stop?

All of my friends have been great; everyone says, “If you need anything,” and I appreciate it very much but what would I have them do? Maybe my laundry, which is piling up, or cook dinner for my kids so they don’t have to eat Subway (again,) but really what can they do? The only thing that has gotten me through this craziness that has become my life is My wife.

Sappy, sappy, sappy. I know I’m sappy and I go on and on about how great she is. The truth is that she really is that way and she intensely loves me and takes care of me and I am grateful. I’ve written here before how vulnerable one feels with that kind of love. When things are stressful I feel even more vulnerable and it is sometimes difficult to trust. I have to check in with myself to make sure I’m aware of what is going on in my relationship and where we are. The stressful times are always a bit of a test.

So far, so good.

I relish the moments I get to forget about the 12,000 things I have to do and the 12,000 places I have to go. I forget for a moment and just be with her. It’s my sanity; I have just a little left right now and I’m hoping to hang on to it a bit longer.

————:)

For the record, I think it’s cute that my father friended me on Facebook. Now I’m friends with my daughter and my father; I’m the Facebook Sandwich Generation.

Toxicity

We have a hot tub. I enjoy the hot tub, especially on cool nights when the stars are shining in the sky. I don’t especially like the hot tub when it’s freezing cold because I don’t like the getting IN and the getting OUT of it. Luckily Cher is wonderful enough to go out and open the cover for me and close it up after I run into the house dripping wet. I don’t care for any kind of extreme temperatures of any sort so our Portland Heatwave Hotpocalypse weather has been a little hard to deal with.

Yesterday it was 95, which by Hotpocalypse standards isn’t too bad but I had a speaking engagement at The Q-Center and on our way we stopped at a place to have a drink. We went to a brewery (Cher is a huge IPA fan, loves the stuff, I think it tastes like aspirin.) I had a glass of Oregon Pinot Gris. The place had no A/C because for some reason people in Portland are still under this illusion that we don’t need A/C in this state. (WE have A/C, otherwise I would be dead.) I was wearing a dress that was not made of any kind of natural material, kitten heels, a bra, and a lace thong.

Take a moment and imagine that. Me, in that outfit sitting on a wooden bench in a non air conditioned restaurant in 95 degree weather.

I was getting very sticky. And perspiring. I don’t perspire and I don’t like to perspire and I didn’t bring a compact with me and I was getting shiny before I was going to speak to “Women Who Write” group. I tried not to be a complainer, but when I took a napkin and shoved it into my cleavage, Cher took the hint and paid the check so we could go elsewhere.

The hot tub requires maintenance like a swimming pool. You have to check the chemicals and make sure that they are balanced. If the PH is high, you add a chemical. If it’s low, you add a PH balance, you know, like baking soda.

It’s kind of like the flora in your body–too much of one thing makes it not balanced and you get an infection of some sort. It’s important that the good chemicals are balanced with the bad chemicals and vice-versa.

Life is like that too. When we have any kind of Toxicity in our lives, it is important to balance it with something neutral or better yet, something that is the antithesis of toxic. Sometimes that balance gets a bit shifted and it is even more important to seek out a way to balance it out, in whatever way that may be: good friends, comfort food, distraction for a bit, meditation, sex, love or all of these.

There are people in life who will try to poison you and they may even succeed for a bit and for some of us, they will succeed for a long while. We don’t have to allow their venom to hurt us, we can choose to work at finding a way to balance the toxicity and put ourselves on the side of having more goodness in our lives and bodies than the yuckiness. It is difficult when we don’t know the poison is coming, but that’s when it’s even more important to find our own personal baking soda of sorts!

Cher is my baking soda. My dear friends are my baking soda. My work is my baking soda. My beautiful children are my baking soda (when they’re not fighting with each other!) This blog and the amazing people I meet through it are my baking soda. And for that I’m very grateful.

I had some toxicity in my life this week and it was painful. It still hurts and my stomach is still upset from it but all of the things I mentioned have helped me to get a little more balanced. Being with my supportive wife, speaking to amazing women writers last night, taking my daughter to register for high school, and my beautiful friends have all helped me to feel so much better.

I’m thankful for those who value me as a person and value who and what I am in this world. Thank you for being the treasures of my life.

Codependency Rocks

My wife is coming home. Her plane lands at 2 and I’ll be so grateful to have her back with me. We’ve spent two weekends away from each other and both of those weekends were probably harder on me than they needed to be. I’ve had to really look at a few things inside that bubbled up, I’ve had to deal with some of my own insecurities and I’ve had to balance all of that with all of the constant activity in my life. I’m not even in school right now and sometimes I feel like there are so many demands on my time that come in from so many different directions. All of it causes the ever-so-lovely anxiety that I deal with from time to time to rise up and take over. I’m not even quite sure how to relax right now, how can I when I feel like I have a constant flow of adrenaline pumping through my veins–keeping the anxiety in my chest and in my stomach and in my throat?

I wanted to have fun. I love to have fun. I did have fun. I wonder if maybe this weekend I should have just stayed home with my dogs and re-read Gone With the Wind or something? Or a self-help book or did a project? I think I probably could have used that but I didn’t want to sit at home by myself and think about how much fun Cher was having in Las Vegas without me. That’s stupid, isn’t it? That’s insecurity, that’s what that is.

Loving a woman is a beautiful thing. I love loving a woman and I love everything that comes with loving a woman. But it’s a vulnerable feeling, which sometimes makes me feel helpless. We love each other so deeply that I feel as though we sometimes live inside of each other. Sometimes I feel like  I can feel what she is feeling, whether that’s happy or excited or disappointed or sad, and I feel it so strongly it hard to differentiate my emotions from hers. And I show her everything. There are no hidden places or ugliness within me that she hasn’t seen. I think that sometimes she wants to close her eyes and not look but eventually she always does and somehow still loves me anyway.

Two weekends away of us both having fun (separately) with other people and not each other. It’s not that I can’t share, I do share, I share nicely but two weekends away combined with family and kid stuff for the two days in between came out to be like eleven days away from each other.

I need her.

I need her to wipe away my anxiety and insecurity with her love and attention.

I need to lay naked with her and talk about stuff. Any kind of stuff, just stuff in general but not stuff about my ex-husband or bills or the fact that we really need to paint the house and that I messed up the hot tub chemicals when I dumped out some of the water to make it a Cold Tub during the Portland Hotpocalypse.

I want to lay naked with her and have her tell me how amazing I am and that she can’t imagine living a moment without me (and how skinny I am from my Heatwave diet this week.) I want her to make love to me for hours and take me out for dinner where we’ll share a bottle of wine and talk about the future and the places we’ll go and see and how someday we’ll live in a little Old Portland bungalow with a southern facing backyard that I can plant a garden that will yield more than the three tomatoes I have this year. I want to feel our connection and the safety of our familiarness. I want her to remind me that I am number one in her life and that I always will be. I may want those things because I’m a tad bit codependent, but I want them anyway. Codependency is only bad when it’s one sided, right? What we have is mutual codependence so that’s just about as healthy as you can get, (or so I’ll tell myself.)

Either way, I don’t care because I think it rocks.

The love that I have in my life is special but it is the kind of love that, I believe, everyone can have in their life. It’s not worth settling for something less than insane attraction + friendship +partnership. A relationship can have it all even if it doesn’t have it all at the same time all of the time. I think when people are in a relationship for a period of time we tend to forget what that time was like in the very beginning. That time of cathexis when we turn all of our energy on the other person and can only see the beauty and sexiness and glow of her. There are no thoughts of what needs to be done in everyday mundane life: it’s all about the excitement and the investment in her. It’s beautiful and amazing. It’s not meant to last. No one could possibly handle those kinds of emotions for any length of time and that’s okay; cathexis fades into something different, but it doesn’t have to be gone forever, it can be recreated. And I need a little of that at the same time I need the safety of my committed relationship because I don’t want to settle for any kind of status quo. That’s not selfish, that’s the way it should be and I’m lucky enough to have a partner willing to give that to me.

Actually, I’m not lucky. I deserve it. And so does everyone else.

What I’ve learned about being a Derby Widow

Nearly a year ago HG told me that she wanted to try-out for roller derby, which I promptly told her, “Hell No.” I didn’t want her to get hurt and even though I’d never actually seen a derby bout (game, match?, I didn’t know then…) I was sure she would get beat up and then who would pay the mortgage? So we went to a fundraising dinner and saw some roller girls who were there volunteering. They didn’t look overly scary. Soon after we went to our first bout (game, match?) and I agreed that HG should try-out. After that, everything fell into place and I knew before she even tried out that she would make it. I knew after she made it to the Fresh Meat team that she would be drafted to a team her first time out–and she did. What I didn’t know was how much all of this would change our lives.

Before I went back to school (and had the kind of job where I went to work and was around people) HG’s interests consisted of me, running, doing the laundry and watching Law and Order. Now there is nothing wrong with these things as interests but because HG moved here from California and didn’t have any friends here–she didn’t really have her own circle, her own thing, her own (life) outside and independent of our relationship and what friends I had at the time. This was a bit of an issue at times because this meant that her energy was very focused on the interests that she did have and there is only so much laundry to do in a day. Although she never articulated it, I’m sure it was pretty depressing to be home (doing laundry) without her own gig in life. We all need our autonomy and to feel as though we belong somewhere. We all need a place to direct our energies, our time and our talent. I’ve always had these things–my life has always been full of ways for me to develop my interests and share myself with the world. I wanted this for HG.

She found that in Roller Derby and surprisingly, so have I.

Joining a roller derby league is not just playing a sport. These girls are so damn dedicated and work hard every single day; they practice a minimum of three nights a week, they volunteer their time to the league and to other charities, they set up, clean, and tear down before and after bouts, they sell tickets, they promote their teams and the leagues and every day throughout the day are team and league issues to talk about and deal with.

They don’t get paid. They pay dues to have the privilege of doing all of this. They don’t get news coverage by local sports media, fame, or notoriety. They do all of it for the love of the game and for the sense of belonging that comes from being part of something that is important.

Why is it important?

It’s important because we live in a world that is dominated by men and male interests. We live in a world where a strong woman is considered threatening and wrong.

We live in a world that the ideal woman looks like this:

Not this:

These girls are Bad Ass. They skate fast, they hit hard and they take a risk every time they get on the track. Yes, they are wearing pads but they are also have wheels on their feet and moving faster than a football or basketball player can run. Bumps and brusies are every day and sometimes injuries are much more serious: black eyes, broken jaws, broken bones, torn ACL’s, back injuries, shoulder injuries, you name it. And what do they do when they get hurt like that? Wait until the doctor says they can skate again and get right back on the track. Bad Ass.

In our patriarchal world that doesn’t encourage women to express themselves this way, roller derby is a tool for change. Derby girls are free to be serious athletes and sexy at the same time. They don’t subscribe to “societies” version of what size, shape, and demeanor they should have–they look and dress how they like and if that means ripped fishnets and hot pants–they bring it. I’m constantly impressed with the level of self-esteem these girls posses and how different that is from most of the rest of us; non-derby women have a lot to gain and a lot to learn by watching skaters. I’m so proud of HG and what she has accomplished in derby. She’s worked hella hard and dedicated and focused a tremendous amount of time and energy to this part of her life. The results are beautiful to watch.

What I didn’t realize about all of this was what the impact would be on me. I’m cool with HG being gone three nights a week for practice. Two nights a week I don’t see her from when she kisses me goodbye in the morning until I’m getting ready for bed–but that’s okay and the sacrifice is worth it. The impact that has surprised me has been all positive.

Somehow I’ve become a part of this. HG’s team mates are my friends now. I spend more time with them than I do any of my other friends. I spend almost as much time doing social media for the league as I do for myself. I get excited reading live tweets from team bouts I don’t even know about; I peruse online skating stores more than any other and I don’t even skate!

It’s crazy.

I was relieved when HG found something of her own to do and somehow it’s become something we share. (I asked HG and she’s okay with sharing derby with me as long as she’s the only one who skates, which I assured her would remain the case!)

So what I’ve learned about being a derby widow? What I’ve lost in time with HG, I’ve gained tenfold by the new friends and exciting projects that I get to be a part of. Supporting roller derby is supporting women and promoting feminism. We need strong-ass-kickin-hard-hitting women in the world to show young girls that they can do anything!

It’s important and it matters.

If you have a roller derby league in your area, go watch a bout. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be inspired to try out!

If you’re in Portland, you probably know where to go, but if not here’s the link.

Home

This is my favorite photo from the trip. She was the Brazilian Girl who taught the water aerobics class. Needless to say . . . we sat behind her as often as possible. Why do water aerobics when I have this to watch?

Our vacation was amazing. It was hot and beautiful. The beach, the pool, the fun people . . . the margaritas.

There was a 5.3 earthquake one morning–and I thought HG only rocked the world for me? I heard it and felt it and yelled out, “Jesus Fucking Christ, was that an Earthquake?” HG replied, “Yes, go back to sleep.” But I couldn’t sleep because I was certain there would next be a Tsunami and we would certainly drown inside our room.

We didn’t and by the time I woke back up, I’d almost forgotten about it.

We met the nicest ladies; they were from Chicago, The Bay Area, Kentucky, Boston, Connecticut, Portland (both of them,) Florida, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, L.A.  and Washington D.C. (I’m sure there were more, I’m tired.)

We went to the beach . . .

The pool . . .

Sailing . . .

Dancing . . .

And saw many fashion atrocities . . .
(I’m too polite to post them here, but trust me on this.)

Most of all, we had a wonderful time being together . . .

This amazing experience was brought to me by my beautiful wife who for some reason does such nice things for me all of the time.

As with every single one of our Olivia Vacations, I don’t have enough nice things to say–every single thing was wonderful and each memory will be forever cherished. There is something so magical about being with 500+ lesbians in a tropical, fantastic location that brings tears to my eyes each and every time.

I’m so grateful to my wife, to the new friends we’ve made, and to Oliva for a beautiful week!

Leather

Today, three years and a few hours ago was the day I met the love of my life. That would make it our “Leather Anniversary!”

Hmmmm. I’m not quite sure what to do with that one.

What I do know is that my life changed three years ago and I became a person who realized the kind of love that every person should realize in their life. I found someone who I can live my life with and experience the kind of joy I never imagined.

Everything changed three years ago and my life would never, and will never, be the same. For that, I am eternally grateful and lucky and loved and cherished.

Now.

Leather?

Roller Girl

HG needs to pick her Roller Girl name, today. We have some ideas but suggestions are very welcome. Don’t post them here in the comments however, as the names need to be Top Secret! E-mail them here.

My Wife

Is amazing for so many reasons.

One of the reasons she is so amazing is because she is amazingly talented.

And hot.

HG decided that she wanted to be on a roller derby team and so less than a month ago she roller skated for the first time in years–bought some skates and started practicing her “moves.” She went to the sponsored derby clinics and prepared for the try-outs–not knowing what her chances were.

Tonight were the try-outs. There were 24 women competing for 5 spots.

HG MADE THE TEAM!

I am so very proud of her (and worried, but we won’t worry about that right now!)

Yeah HG–the newest member of the Rose City Rollers Fresh Meat Team!