Bits & Pieces #8

On loving and living against the odds - and not wanting to do it any other way.

It’s May, it’s May!

Okay, but Camelot got it right - this May has been (so far!) blissfully lusty and indulgent and intense. May is a time for love, the kind of giddy, giggly new love that grows best alongside sunshine and fresh fruit and seedlings and wildflowers and warm evenings and waterfalls. I always feel lucky to be in love come May, because it’s the month we celebrate my sweet wife’s birthday; seeing them in all their Taurus glory is a true delight. Ash comes back to life in the sunshine after months of grey Portland winner. Their bike comes out of the garage and I’m awe by their persistence to bike commute across town. They mow the lawn and dig holes and fix fences and take the cars for oil changes. Their eyes twinkle at the idea of a craft beer on a patio or a particular piece of specialty outdoor clothing.

May helps to remind me why I fell in love with Ash in the first place.

I’m so grateful for the perspective this season brings me on our relationship and our journey together. My native plant garden that is beginning to bloom reflects not hard work but commitment - not control but acceptance. I am grateful for those seeds planted in the fall that have started to climb and flower, fulfilling their true nature, blooming whenever they bloom. The wildflowers and bushes and grasses ignore human timelines, rules, restrictions, and calendars - and they remind me how we too, as a queer, multiracial family, have made our own way and followed our own path.

Literal Star-Crossed Lovers

When we first started dating, we did that thing that all (most? queer??) couples do and looked up our horoscope compatibility. But when we selected Taurus + Leo we were met with a very clear message from the stars: “STAY AWAY! YOU’RE DOOMED!” But we were in love and had made what felt like huge sacrifices to be together and we were IN LOVE, OKAY?! so we ignored the doom and gloom from Astrology.com and pushed forward. It will be a fun challenge, we told ourselves. We’ll prove everybody wrong.

Young and in love and much more focused on taking cute mirror selfies than listening to anyone’s advice.

Eight years later and we were right: it has been exciting - and ohmygosh so challenging. But as far as proving everybody wrong, besides a few choice people I’d like to teleport into my current life and let them have a look around while I smugly rub my happiness in their face, that’s a little bit more tenuous. When the standard for relationship success looks like a heterosexual nuclear family, how do you measure up while breaking the mold? Queer relationships don’t come with the same rules that society lays out for straight people - which is fun and thrilling and also completely scary and overwhelming, especially if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool perfectionist white girl like me.

I thought I needed a blueprint…

In the early days of our relationship, when Ash and I were in conflict over something (which, according to our still accurate horoscope compatibility almost always comes down to communication, our different social batteries and good ol’ unwillingness to be wrong), I went searching for answers, guidelines, advice - anything to help me figure out what I was supposed to be doing or feeling. I often felt like I was setting myself up with a binary choice: either model our relationship to be exactly the same as a straight couple’s or exactly the opposite. As it turns out, this didn’t actually help us determine whose turn it was to do the dishes.

When E was born, this all became more intense. So much parenting advice is gendered - you can find tons of articles about how moms are burnt out, how moms can ask dads to step up, how dads can help take on the mental load, how moms need to prioritize self-care. It felt like other moms I talked to online and in person were all complaining about their terrible husbands - and even the ones who weren’t explicitly terrible still had room to improve in the same stereotypical areas of sharing childcare, managing housework, and providing emotional support.

I didn’t want to compare Ash to someone’s husband who played video games all night long - but still wanted them to stay awake to spend time with me after the baby fell asleep. I knew that Ash wasn’t devaluing my housework or caregiving while they were at their full-time job because I was a mom - but still needed them to understand the unique challenges of being at home with a baby all day long. Every time I tried to bring these things up in moments of conflict, I ended up parroting this narrative of husband vs. wife and dad vs. mom - not because I really saw our partnership as gendered, but because that was the only narrative I had to fall back on.

And then, I felt like a bad queer person. We’re supposed to be different than all those miserable straight couples¹, I thought. We’re so lucky that we get to live beyond the binary, that we get to do things differently, but we’re having the same stupid arguments. I was digging myself deeper and deeper into resentment and shame.

At some point, at the bottom of that hole, the root of that resentment and shame became very clear: it was just another replication of the gendered, oppressive ways that capitalism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy hang on to power. I realized I was often trying to prune and trim and manage our relationship by made-up rules imposed by the overculture instead of letting our love spread into its truest shape.

… instead, I just made my own.

I stopped trying to follow the advice of how to get your husband to share the mental load and started reconnecting with those cute baby queers in love, who believed in their love so much that they wouldn’t take no for an answer, that they wouldn’t listen to any naysayers who laid any expectations on us that could be linked back to cultural norms that wouldn’t accept our relationship as legitimate no matter how we operated.

I unfollowed all the parenting and motherhood accounts that seemed to center on shitty husbands and gendered relationship advice, and began to interrogate the root of any advice I encountered.

I focused on bolstering our community of queer families, and having frank conversations with friends about their queer partnerships - how they balanced chores, handled finances, and waded through the same heteronormative bullshit that we did.

And I settled back into values that had brought Ash and I together into love: our shared belief in a better, freer, healthier, queerer world.

It’s wild, it’s gay!

If you don’t get this reference, were you even a theater kid?!

I never know what’s coming when May hits: how much my strawberry will spread, when exactly the asters will bloom, how many new milkweed plants will sprout. I watch and listen. I add mulch, I pick up trash, I pull weeds. And I seek out guidance from other humans in relationship with their own small patches of earth, nurturing the land after years of pesticides, pollution, and waste.

The other day, on the sidelines of my son’s last soccer game, I spent a long time chatting with another queer parent about how both of us were trying to navigate offering space and support to our partners without trying to force them to accept help - or to seek comfort in the same things we do. We shared the same experience of navigating these kinds of conflict without the barriers and guidelines that straight relationships have, without having generations of gender roles and social norms to lean on. And at the end of our conversation, we looked at each other and agreed - we wouldn’t want to do it any other way. Because what an adventure it is to build queer family and queer community instead of trying to force our love into containers that would restrict our growth, movement, and joy.

To me, being in queer partnership, building a queer family, is wild - a wild that can’t be contained in garden beds or window boxes or landscape grids. In a world where capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy are desperately trying to hang on to control, wild gets labeled as unruly, disruptive, and dangerous - but we know that, while unpredictable, our wild life, and our wild Leo/Taurus love, is worth it.

1. No, I don’t think that all straight couples are miserable - but there’s so much content out there about shitty husbands and wine moms that I really do worry about some of you sometimes!