Night

It's Christmas eve. We've been all day at "family" events. In a poly family like ours, that becomes complicated. There's T's family -- mom and brother and his wife and all the myriad kids. Quite a free for all of gifts and wildness. An open loving gang, where I've always been warmly welcomed and included even though there is no actual explanation for my presence. Later, dinner with Himself's family -- His parents, ex-wife and her mother, His kids. That's a much more constrained and formal sort of group, where the protocols are stiffer, but even with them there is a sort of de facto level of matter of factness to my being around. Still, I am clearly the extra person that no one quite knows what to do about, and there is the need to be discreet in my behavior. It is a strain.

The family that I would label as "mine" in some sense is all very far away both geographically as well as emotionally, mostly. The only living parent, my mother, is estranged -- civil but unaccepting and unwelcoming of my life or my partners. Of my two brothers, only one still speaks to me at all and he is alternately grudgingly accepting and then preachy about how I am being stubborn in my attitude toward "mom." My grown children are really OK I think, but busy (even more than busy) putting together their own lives, and so have little time or wherewithal to be interacting with me. And so the decision made to pick up and follow this path has led me into personal exile. That is acutely felt in this season when all and sundry immerse themselves in "family."

And I am reminded of the places where "slavery" of the sort I claim is solitary in nature. It is not His to meet my needs or keep me happy. That I am feeling sad, longing for gentle touches, yearning for the sorts of foreplay that might inflame me ahead of the pain I know is my lot... These are not the things that are His fault or legitimately His concerns. And still, in the dark of the night, I lie awake and know how very alone I am and know how very dark the road ahead of me seems just now, and how very few choices there really are for one who embarks on this journey. And, yes, I do wonder if I chose wisely when I made the choice. I think I did, but still, in the night, I wonder -- I am, perhaps a terrible coward.

swan