Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women (21 page)

Eventually Ann falls asleep. I listen to her kitty snores and think of the nights I’ve spent kicking Richard so he’ll stop snoring, snores that shook the bed and made sleeping together intolerable and finally impossible. Snores that made me wake up angrier even than when I’d fallen asleep.

Ann’s digital watch beeps on the hour. After the fourth beep I slip out from between her arms, pull on my clothes, and walk into the dark night. The air is scented with jasmine, like the jasmine Richard planted along the fence of our home in San Jose. There’s a phone booth outside the hotel office, with a night light that guides me to it. I dial my home number, where my husband and children sleep.

Before it rings, I hang up. What will I say? “This is your last chance to save me from this,” I imagine myself saying to Richard. “Please . . . save me from this.”

I know he can’t. I know I can’t. I know that lesbian isn’t really the right word, that my need to separate my life from Richard’s and my need to feel Ann’s hands and mouth on me are two different needs with two different sources. I know that I have lusted after men, and that I now lust after a woman who sleeps just a few yards from where I stand. I go to where she is.

Living the Authentic Life

Micki Grimland

M
y daughter Haley came in half-undressed from ice hockey practice. She was sobbing, a very rare experience, as she is my stoic child. I would have expected my daughters Taylor or Cami to come in crying about all kinds of things, but not Haley.

“Honey, what in the world is wrong?” I asked.

Between tears streaming down her face and sobs she said, “Mom, I just found out my two ice hockey coaches are lesbians, and they are a couple!”

This was something I had known but had never uttered to anyone because they coached kids. We lived in the very white, very Republican, very conservative Bible Belt suburbs of Houston, a place where too many people think “gay” is synonymous with “child molester.”

“Oh, honey,” I said.

She replied, “I’m not crying because they’re gay, Mom. I am totally okay with that. I am crying because they are living a lie.”

A thunderbolt of lightning raced through my body. My world stood still. My heart pounded and blood began pulsating through my system. She caught it in my eyes.

“What’s wrong, Mommy?”

“Haley, I struggle with the same thing that your coaches do.”

She immediately stopped crying.

“Are you coming out to me, Mom?”

I said, “Haley, you’ve teased me for years about being a lesbian.” At that moment, Taylor walked in.

“Mom’s coming out to me,” Haley said. “I need some therapy.”

Because I am a therapist, this was a common joke between the kids when something heavy needed some lightness. Taylor’s eyes flew wide open.

“What?”

“Haley’s hockey coaches are closeted lesbians, and I struggle with the same thing they do.” At the time, I had been married for twenty-three years to my college sweetheart, the son of a very conservative Southern Baptist family.

“Mom, it is one thing for
us
to tell
you
that you’re a lesbian. It’s a completely other thing for you to tell us!”

Once, doing a homework assignment, we were unable to get onto Taylor’s Internet account, so we used my account. She said, “I know your password; it’s ‘lesbian.’”

I said, “Why would you say that? That’s not my password.”

She pulled me eyeball to eyeball and said, “Because if it weren’t for Haley and Cami and I, you would be a lesbian.”

Many comments similar to this were uttered over the years before I came out.

To step into the authenticity of who you are when you are a closeted gay woman—a mother to three girls whom you worship—married to a man you love and respect (and have great sex with), is a complicated web of paradoxes.

Carl Jung said it best: “Soul is made in the tension of a paradox.” I held that tension secretly for years. In college, I was acutely aware of being attracted to a friend of mine, but I chalked it up to her making me nervous because she was so beautiful. Then, as a young professional, I was at a conference on marital therapy in New Orleans. Late one night, some friends and I went to a nightclub. Walking behind my friends, my eyes fixed on this beautiful woman in white pants. I was transfixed. Her boyfriend leaned down and whispered, “What are you, a lesbian, or what?” His words still sting in my ears. It was my first awareness that I didn’t look at women the way my other girlfriends did.

On my fortieth birthday, my husband threw me a surprise party. As the night went on, a friend pointed out, “You are
so
connected to your women friends. You’re the most like a lesbian without being a lesbian of anyone I’ve ever known.”

My good friend Sarah had been openly gay since she was a teenager. She and I began spending more and more time together. I was intrigued by her—mesmerized by her, in fact. I told myself it was her spirituality and interest in in-depth psychology that drew me to her. As a therapist who had done a lot of my own interpersonal work, I was not prepared for the lessons my unconscious was preparing to teach me.

One day on the phone, Sarah said to me: “You know, Micki, you are the most touchy-feely person I know. You touch everyone: people you love, acquaintances, even strangers. But you
never
touch me!” I began to shake and sweat. I said, “That’s not true!” She was right, I hug everyone. I was totally unaware that I had never touched or hugged her.

She said, “I’m coming over tonight and you’re going to give me a hug.” I laughed it off, but became very nervous and my heart began to palpitate. She did come over that night. Being the control freak that I am, I turned her around to hug her from behind so that I could be in charge of the hug. She turned to hug me face-to-face, and to my shock and surprise, I kissed her. When I did, something deep inside me shifted with an almost audible click . . . as if I’d found that one puzzle piece that had been lost under the sofa for years . . . the one that completes the picture. After that kiss, my world began to shake and quiver. An emotional earthquake was imminent.

I fell deeply in love with her. I call her “the pathmaker of my becoming.” As a Southern Baptist, deeply devoted mother, and believer in the vows of marriage, I also fell into a deep depression. I was totally split. To quote my analyst: “What kept me alive the first half of my life was keeping me from living the second half of my life.”

I was forty years old, married to a man who I didn’t want to hurt, and I was mama bear to three children. I believed that my calling in life was to protect them from pain.
And
I was madly in love with a woman. In her depth of love for me in return, Sarah moved out of state because the split was killing me. I was living a total lie. I lost twenty pounds, my hair was falling out, and I was taking antidepressants. My analyst, whose devoted compass kept me afloat during this time, kept telling me he didn’t think I was gay. He thought I was breaking free from the “good girl, adult-child-of-an-alcoholic-home, driven-to-perfection, OCD, control freak paradigm” from which I operated. I convinced myself that he was right, put Sarah in a sacred locked box in my heart, cut off all contact with her, and tried to squeeze back into my old self. However, nothing felt right anymore.

I lost interest in sex with my husband, poured myself into the girls, and tried not to be gay, convincing myself it was just Sarah. I did pretty well until two years later, when I went to my daughter’s ice hockey tournament in Canada and was smitten by a woman there. She said to me at one point, “You’ve been with a woman, haven’t you?”

“Only one,” I declared, “and I’m not going down that path again—I’m married.”

We became email buddies and she would periodically ask, “Are you single, yet?”

I began open discussions with my husband, who would say, “You’re not gay, Micki. You’re just ecumenical. Your mind is open—you just can wrap your arms around more things than most people.” However, I began to think about it, and came to the conclusion that we have sex based on our identity. If we’re crazy, we have crazy sex. If we’re passionate in life, we’re passionate in bed. If we’re shut down inside, we’re usually shut down sexually. If we’re gay, we’re most fulfilled in same-sex relationships. Being gay is about identity more than sexuality. Sexuality is a by-product of your identity. I began to accept my identity as a gay woman. It wasn’t Sarah, it was me.

Talking to the kids and going through the divorce was a deeply emotional, painful process. We were able to get a “collaborative divorce” with no battle. Even though that made it very civil, it was still very hard for all of us. The deep hurt my sexuality has caused my ex-husband and his family and my kids is my only regret. To walk into the fire of this transformation is hard, but holding steady to the truth makes it doable. Like the coal burning the diamond into freedom, so is the coming-out practice.

Today, I am happier, more fulfilled, more complete than I could have ever imagined. Sarah and I remain friends and I treasure her deep gift to my becoming. I have been married to a woman, Sharon, for three years now. I never could have imagined a relationship this intimate, this honest, this deep, this fun, in all my days. She is my rock, my resting place, my exhale, my lover, and my best friend. I shall age and die with this woman by my side. We married in a chapel in Texas in front of 250 guests.

I am now fifty-two; my children are twenty-two, twenty, and fifteen. They are happily adjusted and love my partner. We recently had the joy of telling our story on
Oprah.
It is our desire to help people see us as their neighbors, their friends, and to see that our sexuality and identity are nothing to fear. We are spiritual, we are mothers and fathers, workers, shoppers, devoted family members, much more similar to heterosexuals than different. We’re not here to destroy families, seduce straight people, or scare anyone. We are here to live our lives and love the people we love. One of the unfortunate aspects of being gay in our culture is that while I had so many rights as a married straight woman, I do not have the same rights as a married gay woman. I still pay taxes and support my country in many ways. It is unfortunate that my rights are not equal because of my sexuality. We are here to be Americans, to claim the truth of “All people are created equal,” and to receive equal access to the constitutional pursuit of our happiness. It will be a beautiful day when that happiness—alongside our rights—will be recognized for all Americans.

A Door Opening Out

Susan Grier

“
I
magine a door in your mind,” Ray instructs, our pens poised to begin the first exercise of the morning. My graduate writing workshop is gathered around a picnic table on the back deck of a sprawling stone mansion, home to our program’s ten-day summer residency.

“Describe the door,” he continues. “Then imagine walking through the door and describe what is on the other side. Now imagine that someone approaches you. Describe the encounter you have with this person.”

The words flow from my hand—an old, rustic door opening out to a lush, exotic garden that draws me into its shelter; the gentle rustling of someone approaching to tell me I have entered a new dimension of my life; the awe I feel at the beauty and richness of this place; the sense of peace enveloping me as the door closes forever behind me.

Afterward, when we share our responses, Ray has a comment about mine. “Hmmm,” he muses. “I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone write about a door opening to the outside.”

The scene I’d conjured intrigued me on that warm July morning, but the residency’s packed schedule left little time to ponder its meaning. At age fifty, maternal obligations fulfilled, I had gathered my courage and applied to the program to find out what I was made of as a writer. The work infused me with excitement and possibility, a certainty that I was doing the thing I was meant to do, finally, and it was taking me—the me who had crouched, insignificant, in the shadows of my own life—to a place I’d never been before, a place that felt good and right.

Months later, back at home in Maryland and well into my third-semester work and teaching, I returned to Ray’s comment with a mix of disbelief and amazement, seeing in my words a truth I couldn’t have fathomed before summer turned to fall, before seemingly random forces and events fell into place.

That fall,
as I will always think of it, the chair of the English department asked me, via last-minute email, to mentor a new adjunct. I’d met Trish briefly at the pre-semester faculty meeting, taking her in with one glance. In contrast to my summery outfit of striped capri pants and matching sandals, she wore thick jeans and brown lug-soled shoes in a way that read butch, a look and manner that usually set off a vague internal alarm—
careful, watch yourself, not too close
—even as it fascinated me. But the yellow of her shirt brought out the softness of her blond cropped hair and the pink of her cheeks, and her eyes held a kind of earnestness, an unexpected vulnerability that drew me in. When she sat down beside me, I felt a secret thrill.

“Of course,” I replied to the English Department chair.

Trish and I overlapped in the faculty lounge on Tuesdays and Thursdays, twenty minutes between the end of my class and the beginning of hers. It was a natural time to check in, see how things were going, make easy conversation. She was reserved, in the way people are who take care to be polite. She was also kind, smart, funny, and I wanted to know more of her.

I still remember the day I admitted to myself how attracted I felt to her. She stood near the copy machine, I on the other side of the conference table across from her. Our eyes met across the table, hers gray-green, clear and shining with a light that seemed to pierce me deep in my gut, and it was as if she could see what was hidden there—or maybe it was I who could see it and know it for what it was. Something in my chest caught, like the creak of a door hinge the moment before it opens.

That fall, I had been married seventeen years to my second husband. The marriage wasn’t going well—had not gone well for most of its duration—but I’d stayed for the usual reasons women stay: the illusion of security, the status and privilege marriage conveys, a comfortable lifestyle, a reluctance to admit failure, the dread of upheaval and going it alone, the thinking that things will magically get better if only I persevere, the voice that rationalized,
it’s not that bad, it could be so much worse.

When we got together, my two children were small, and I believed that by marrying again I could knit my little family back together. More than anything, I wanted to be a good mother, to create a nurturing, harmonious home for my children. But there were problems: step-parent problems, relationship problems, financial problems. Seven years in, I had almost left, and from that point on the marriage had felt like an endurance test.
I have got to get out of this marriage,
I would tell myself,
when the kids are older, when I earn more money, when I feel stronger
.

We lived in a two-story brick colonial on a winding lane, a small neighborhood of gently rolling lots and open spaces. I loved my house, its sunny kitchen, the way the rooms flowed one to the next, the perennial beds and herb garden I had cultivated outside. Over the years, I had poured myself into making the house a home—paint, wallpaper, window treatments, furniture—bit by bit, piece by piece, the selection of each detail slow and painstaking, as if something huge hung in the balance of each decision, as if the composition of tastefully appointed rooms could hold the marriage together.

At one point, we remodeled the master bathroom, enlarging the space to include a separate vanity for me, whirlpool tub, multi-sprayer shower, and private toilet stall. The room felt airy, serene, indulgent. Sometimes in the middle of the night when I’d get up to use the bathroom, I’d sit there in the dark and think,
How can I give up this bathroom that makes me so happy?

Though it had not been a conscious intention, pursuing a master’s degree proved a step away from the marriage, taking me far from home twice a year for on-site residencies, directing my energy and focus into a whole new world that was mine alone, allowing me a kind of separateness I hadn’t known in a very long time. The distance, both physical and psychological, gave me the clarity to see how miserable I was in the marriage, how much it damaged my spirit to stay, how I was compromising myself, tolerating conditions that should have been unacceptable. With each completed semester, I could feel the strength in me churning, mounting, and I began to picture a different kind of life for myself.

I fantasized about finding a cottage on the river or in the woods and fixing it up to suit me, painting all the walls pink if I wanted to. I didn’t care if it was small or run-down. I could feel the relief of living alone, the space all mine, female, peaceful and serene. I couldn’t imagine wanting to be with another man for a long time, if ever. Yet I wanted to believe that somewhere out there was the kind of love I’d always longed for, a deep connection that was passionate, profound, soul-stirring.

At times during the marriage, I had told my husband outright that if things didn’t improve, I would leave him one day. Now, as I began to envision my escape, I kept quiet. I feared his anger, the verbal and emotional abuse that would rain down on me once he learned I was leaving for sure. If I didn’t maintain the status quo, I risked losing control of the process that would see me through the successful completion of graduate school before the chaos of splitting up began. I was not going to let this man ruin the best thing I had done for myself in years.

That fall, I was reading Carolyn Heilbrun. Her 1988 book,
Writing a Woman’s Life,
resonated so deeply it had become the backbone of my third-semester critical thesis. She talked of patriarchy, its continued hold on women’s lives despite two decades of radical feminism, the subtle ways it still silenced us, forbade our most authentic emotions, isolated us from one another. She talked of the bonds between women, our ability to give each other something men could not. She talked of the power of autobiographical writing to transform women’s lives, to free us from “the stories and houses of men.”

Born and raised Southern, I knew about patriarchy, knew first-hand the power of male privilege. I called myself a feminist. Yet my upbringing had been one of such privilege, such seductive beauty and grace, that I still lingered under its influence, still acquiesced to its unwritten codes, so deeply internalized I wasn’t even aware of them. In response to an essay I’d written the previous winter about my father buying me, at age fifty, a Lexus, my very liberal male professor had exclaimed in disgust, “Where is the rage?” and I hadn’t understood. Reading Heilbrun’s book, I finally felt in my emotional gut the depth and breadth of what patriarchy had stolen from me. It was a loss of self, my female spirit denied the opportunity to explore its own bounds, flex its own muscles, discover its own voice. Instead, I had been groomed to dress, speak, and behave in ways that would win the approval of men in exchange for the promise of protection, security, status—even a luxury car.

“Women come to writing simultaneously with self-creation,” was one of Heilbrun’s lines I kept returning to, ignited by the thought of my work, my writing, leading me further into the undiscovered self I could sense there, ready to emerge. My critical thesis may have focused on other women’s lives and works, but the inquiry was ultimately about me, about breaking free from a way of being that had held me prisoner from the moment I was born.

That fall, I decided to ditch one of the two medications I took for depression. My doctor had added Lexapro for anxiety several years before, after my older son left for college and the younger one totaled my car. I had been fragile and shaky then, had lost too much weight. But now I felt strong, on top of things—teaching three composition classes, taking yoga twice a week, stimulated by the work of my critical thesis.

I wanted a different relationship with my body: more accepting of its limitations and weaknesses, more compassionate and respectful. Surely there were other ways to achieve at least some of what antidepressants did for me—more yoga, meditation, time outdoors, exercise. Maybe I needed one antidepressant, but did I really need two? Was the relief they provided even as good and necessary as I had believed?

Without them, my life had sometimes seemed jagged and raw, a precarious, high-strung balance on a thin, shaky wire. But maybe there was good reason for the depression I experienced. Maybe it came from something real and painful I needed to look at. Maybe, instead of smoothing out the rough edges with medication, I needed to feel them, let them cut into me, allow myself to bleed for a change. Without consulting my doctor or telling my husband, I tapered off Lexapro, just to see what would happen.

What happened was that I became unleashed. Within days, it became clear that my twin doses of antidepressants had been keeping my marriage intact. I had managed to tolerate my husband only by taking drugs. Now, everything he did irritated me, even the way he breathed. Perhaps it was mutual. Tensions between us mounted to new highs, exacerbated by the presence of my older son—the one he’d never gotten along with—who had moved home for a few months to save money. Watching the churlish way he interacted with my son brought into sharp focus the blunt truth that I needed to free myself from this man, sooner rather than later. In the bathroom at night, I sat in the quiet of my little stall and sighed,
Even if I have to live in a trailer, it will be better than this.

Then, something else shook loose, released from its medicated numbness. I knew Lexapro had dulled my libido. But this was a surprise, an aching desire from a place deep within, a place that had nothing to do with my husband.

One Friday, alone in the house after a morning yoga class, I took a bath, telling myself a long, hot soak would help me settle down to write afterward. I lay back, letting the water soothe sore muscles, relinquishing myself to its warm embrace, and the hand sprayer became my new lover, a gentle lover who knew what I wanted, how to touch me, when and where.

The bath became a Friday morning ritual, me and the hand sprayer, the warm force of it kneading and plying me to exquisite tension, shattering, and release. It was delicious and satisfying that I could do this myself, my own way, in my own time, and then soak in the pleasure of my body. It was not that I’d never done this before, but it was different in the way I regarded my body—not as an instrument of sexual release, but as companion and friend.