Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women (26 page)

Some might have said I was suicidally depressed. Or at the very least, unhinged.

There was one redeeming thought that kept me barely tethered to life. Although I’d lost my identity, I’d found my soul mate. Someday, when everything was worked out, and my husband had a girlfriend of his own, and our kids were grown, Verena and I would live in a bougainvilleacovered cottage overlooking the Mediterranean. (We wouldn’t keep any sharp objects in the house.) The grandkids would visit us frequently and our lives would be full of love and laughter and family.

Then.

Verena told me she was thinking about taking a solo road trip in order to wrap her mind around our “non-relationship” because
what we had
wasn’t real. News to me.
What we had
was the one true thing in my life. I was sure her need to get away grew out of my need to loathe myself. I would have wanted to get away from me too, given the mess I’d become.

She was gone for a few weeks, incommunicado. My cells ached for her. I had blond chunk highlights dyed into my dark brown hair. I got an ear cartilage piercing at Tattoo Asylum in Venice. I even leased a red Jeep Wrangler, yet still couldn’t settle into my own skin without her in my zip code.

When she finally returned to Los Angeles, glass shard in the hand I longed to hold, she informed me she’d ended up connecting with the red rocks in Utah and had found her place in nature.

I was thrilled for us. “That’s great, Verena. When can we go see them together?”

But wait. There was more “really exciting” news. “I’ve bought a house there.”

“Where?”

“In Utah.”

“What??”

“I’m going to move there.”

“Where?”

“To Utah. With Tory.”

“What?”

“I’m going to move to Utah with Tory. You can come visit us, if you want.”

“Us?”

They packed their cars and left the next week.

Yes they did. Just like that.

Then there I was; whoever
that
was. Sliced wide open and left for dead. While Verena was in Utah holding Tory’s hand looking at the red rocks, I was in the wake of the storm holding a mirror looking at a stranger. The woman I saw was tired and scared, yet remarkably athletic for her age. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her and wanted to know more.

That’s where the story really begins.

Epilogue

Jennifer Baumgardner

N
ow that you are done reading, I want to talk to you about why you picked up this book in the first place. I imagine you may have gotten it in order to support or understand a loved one who has a story similar to those found in
Dear John, I Love Jane
. Or, more likely, you are living a story similar to those found in
Dear John, I Love Jane
and sought out this book to learn that you are not alone. Far from alone, in fact.

I could have used a book like this when I was twenty-three, when I fell in love with a woman for the first time. After heterosexual relationships throughout high school and college, I was surprised, thrilled, and freaked out by a radical shift in the direction of my affections. There were all the typical signs leading up to my change, I suppose—way too much interest in the lesbians at my office, obsessive listening to Ani DiFranco, contriving ways to drunkenly make out with friends but have it not “mean” anything. But this new love affair came saddled with associations that felt unfamiliar and itchy to me. Was I now a lesbian? Had I always been gay but was just too homophobic or repressed or out of touch with myself to understand my sapphic ways? I was in love but scared; the relationship was glorious and disturbing. I, like the first essayist in this book, searched online for the whereabouts of old beaus to remind myself of who I was or am.

I was devastated (yet relieved) when that first relationship broke up and soon found myself with a guy—a writer, like me, who was funny and sad and,
whew,
a guy. But that scary, exciting question (“Am I a . . . ?”) was still burning in me and, so, not so long after meeting the guy, I met a girl. Correction: I met a great, sexy, strong, passionate, talented, ethical, amazing, and irresistible woman. I left him for her.

I recognized my story in these essays: in the tales of having sex with a woman for the first time, how great it feels to be making it all up, how disorienting it is to have a new identity (lesbian) descend on you like a Civil War costume. If you’re unsure that the new identity fits, you wonder if you’re just scared, or you are, in fact, on to something?

The beauty of these stories is how clearly they demonstrate that working through those types of questions is part of the journey. And it is a particularly significant journey for a female in this society. Falling in love with a woman, as a woman, is deeply linked to feminist endeavors. By that I do not mean that you are a better feminist if you are gay or bisexual, but that falling in love with a woman enables you to overcome, and perhaps heal from, some of the worst wounds of patriarchy. It challenges the voice that says women’s bodies are disgusting, the sexual persona that is passive or must be desired rather than desire, and provides an avenue to sexual pleasure for the body that has been exploited or violated. Falling in love with a woman can free you from the trap of reflected glory—if you once saw yourself as valuable because you landed a certain kind of man, this new state of affairs forces you to derive your sense of worth from yourself.

While I see political energy all over these stories, the dominant power in this book is love. You read the word over and over on these pages. These stories are not just about finding that perfect person to love, but finding yourself and loving her. It’s being connected to something between women; feeling that you are on the side of all of the women who ever wanted something more and who wanted to be bigger or different than the narrow silhouette of traditional womanhood. It’s chafing against the idea that women could only love or be loved in a certain way and proving that assumption dead wrong.

These stories speak to change. In my own life, the rich relationships with women came in the middle of my life story. I now live with a man and have two sons. My life continues to grow and I labor to remain alert to my desires and not fear change. I’m not always successful, but stories like these help me remember that love—especially loving ourselves—is bigger than our fears.

Bios

Jennifer Baumgardner

Jennifer Baumgardner is the co-author (with Amy Richards) of
Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) and
Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). She is the author of
Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) and
Abortion & Life
(Akashic Books, 2008) and the producer of the 2005 film
I Had an Abortion
. A co-owner of the feminist speakers’ bureau Soapbox, Inc., Jennifer also teaches writing at the New School and writes for magazines such as
Glamour, The Advocate,
and
Bitch
. She is currently working on a film and advocacy project about rape, and a book of essays about feminism. Originally from Fargo, North Dakota, Jennifer now lives in New York City with her two sons, Skuli and Magnus, and her boyfriend, BD.

Trish Bendix

Trish Bendix lives in Chicago, where she is the blog editor of MTV & Logo’s
AfterEllen.com
, a site about lesbian and bisexual women in media and entertainment. She has also written for
Bitch, Time Out Chicago, OUT,
Gay.com
, and
The Village Voice
. Find out more about her at
www.trishbendix.com
.

Audrey Bilger

Audrey Bilger teaches literature, gender studies, and yoga at the Claremont Colleges. She is the author of
Laughing Feminism: Subversive Comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen
(Wayne State University Press, 1998), and editor of Jane Collier’s 1753
Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting
for Broadview Literary Texts (2003). She is a regular contributor to
Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture
, and her work has appeared in
The Paris Review
,
Los Angeles Times
, and
ROCKRGRL
.

Katherine A. Briccetti

Katherine Briccetti’s first book,
Blood Strangers: A Memoir,
from which “Wedding Gown Closet” was excerpted, is available from Heyday Books. Her work has appeared in literary journals, magazines, and in several anthologies, aired on public radio, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was awarded a residency at the Vermont Studio Center and is at work on a second memoir,
A Buswoman’s Holiday,
about working with children on the autism spectrum while raising a son with Asperger’s Syndrome. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and can be reached through her website:
www.kathybriccetti.com
.

Aprille Cochrane

Aprille Cochrane currently resides on the West Coast. She has a successful career in education. Her critically reviewed work has been published on multiple websites. She has published a collection of poetry,
Poems from the Girl Next Door: Imaginations, Illusions, and Images
(BookSurge Publishing, 2007), and is working on her second book of erotica.

Ruth Davies

Ruth Davies lives in Brisbane, Australia, with her partner and cat. Her teenage sons share their time between her house and their father’s, just down the road. In her day job, she works for a research organization, editing reports and trying to convince scientists that they, too, can learn to appreciate the finer points of hyphenation trends. Nighttime finds her dabbling in speculative fiction (both the reading and writing thereof), post-graduate study, and various amateur arts activities. She is hoping to learn how to build phrases like Neil Gaiman, paragraphs like Hilary Mantel, and plots like Sarah Waters.

Kami Day

Dr. Kami Day is a retired college composition professor, partner, mother, grandmother, and queer activist. After her twenty-three-year traditional marriage ended, she entered graduate school, where she met her partner, Michele. They have shared their lives for sixteen years, and together have written and published an academic book and several articles and book chapters. They now live in Norman, Oklahoma, where Michele is on the OU faculty, and Kami fills her days with writing, reading, cooking, volunteering with a veteran’s organization, and finding ways to raise awareness about LGBTQ lives and issues.

Lisa M. Diamond

Dr. Lisa M. Diamond is Associate Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at the University of Utah. Dr. Diamond is an internationally recognized expert on female sexuality and specifically on
female sexual fluidity,
which describes the phenomenon of women periodically developing attractions and relationships that run counter to their overall sexual orientation. Dr. Diamond is best known for her unprecedented fifteen-year longitudinal study of one hundred lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, and “unlabeled” women. Her 2008 book,
Sexual Fluidity,
published by Harvard University Press, describes the changes these women underwent in their sexual identities, attractions, and behaviors, and has been awarded the Independent Publishers Book Award and the Distinguished Book award from the American Psychological Association’s Society for the Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues. Dr. Diamond has received numerous other awards for her work from the American Association of University Women, the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, and the American Psychological Association.

Holly Edwards

Holly Edwards has previously written for
The Skinny,
a Scottish lifestyle magazine, and
The Sofia Echo,
the English language newspaper in Bulgaria. She lives in Westcliffe-On-Sea, Great Britain, with her wonderful girlfriend, where she enjoys baking and eating baked goods.

Vanessa Fernando

Vanessa Fernando is a writer and many other things, too. Born and raised in Vancouver, Vanessa is currently working toward a degree in History and Gender Studies at McGill University in Montreal. She is grateful for her family (both biological and chosen).

Susan Grier

Susan Grier’s work has appeared in
Maryland Magazine,
the
Charlotte Observer,
and the 2006, 2008, and 2009 editions of
Women Writers Read,
a publication of St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Her essays have also been published in several anthologies, including
Trans Forming Families: Real Stories About Transgendered Loved Ones
(Oak Knoll Press, 2003) and
Thanksgiving to Christmas: A Patchwork of Stories
(AWOC.COM, 2009). She earned an MFA from The University of Southern Maine/Stonecoast and is writing a memoir about growing up Southern, raising a transgender child, and discovering her inner lesbian at age fifty-one. She lives in St. Mary’s City, Maryland, and works as an editor.