The Marine

I've written before about my son, who was, is, a Marine. Once a marine always a marine, regardless of being on active service. My son was born angry. He was a colicky, difficult baby. I was a very young mother with no clue as to how to care for an infant. I married a man not his father for a home and security. We put his name on the birth certificate. It was not a good situation.

Nevertheless, I loved my cotton top child. His younger brother came along three years later with exactly the opposite temperament. A year later, I divorced their father and began a very difficult journey with a great many side turns and challenges. Their father provided stability. I provided a different way to look at the world. I missed visitation twice in their lives. Once when I was too ill to travel and once when I was snowed in and the police wouldn't allow anyone on the holidays.

I eventually went to college and traded my GED for an Bachelor's degree and grad school. Their father remarried. He didn't approve of my life style. He didn't understand my drive for education. Or my inability to fit into the world we inhabited. He didn't like my parents and thought them to be a poor influence on his children. My mother is schizophrenic and he had little interest in understanding mental illness. And he passed many of his attitudes to my eldest son, right down to condemning my later religious path, sexual orientation and number of cats.

Put that on the back burner.

The Marine now has three children of his own. I held Belle once, when his attitude relented briefly. For a few months before being stationed in Iraq my son included us in his life. He told Cameron that he loved her. He told me he would never cut me off, saying, "I'll never do that to you again."  I knew it was a lie. The one time we saw Belle, my tears rained, because I knew we would never see her again.

For a few years The Marine's wife posted pictures on FaceBook and Piccasa. I regularly tortured myself with photos. When their son was born, fewer pictures were posted. They stopped all together when the third child was born. I'm assuming from FaceBook comments that The Marine preferred my access to be cut off. My daughter-in-law still "friends" me on FaceBook; my son never has. But it became apparent my "friendship" with her was causing difficultly in her marriage, I stopped contacting her.

The other day I was on my younger son's FaceBook. A comment there led to The Marine's Halloween photo of himself, and the comments were public. As was the disrespecting comment to the LGBT community. Sigh.

Put that on the back burner.

I spent 14 years of my children't lives planning, preparing, dreaming of regaining custody. When I finally got joint custody I was also, unfortunately, in the end of a very dangerous, very damaging marriage to a psychopath. So my children didn't get the best of me when  they finally lived with me full time. I immediately plunged into another relationship because I couldn't keep custody without a second paycheck. I look at those four years I had the boys with such a mixture of joy and sadness. I wanted my sons to see another world besides the narrow minded world they came from. They attended ritual with me. My youngest even chose to study the wiccan path for a time. My eldest was horrified, in a quite condemning kind of a way.

Get a small side dish.

Cameron was at one of those gatherings with my children, and spent a long afternoon talking with Marine. They share a strong Christian background. At the time, Cameron had just begun his journey into a dual path. And Cameron can quote scripture with the best of them. For a while it seemed Marine had found a balance and respect for other's beliefs. But when he choose to return to his father's home to finish his last year of high school, he stopped speaking to me. I later heard about the very harsh paper he wrote for an English class about, "My Mother the Witch."

Stir it all together.

I t is truly one of life's greatest ironies that in my fourth decade of life I found my path and left behind abusive, damaging relationships. By all rights, I should be dead several times over. On the streets of Atlanta. At the hands of my biological sperm donor. At the hands of several ex-husbands. Then in my fourth decade I fell in love with Cameron. I followed him to this state and we created a world of love and stability. I went back to school. I became a therapist. I repaired my damaged relationship with my parents. I bought my very modest home and put down roots. And those very choices have cost me my grandchildren. Today my heart grieves.


One of the hardest part of this grief over the loss of my son and his children is other people's comments. The placating tones of someone's "Blood is thicker than water" or "One day he will realize" sets my teeth on edge. My study of family systems has taught me that one parent can replace another, just as my own adopted father has replaced my evil sperm donor. Marine has a lovely step-mother who is loving, yet as narrow minded as his father and himself. There's no room for me. The safety of Marine's narrow minded world requires him to be closed off from me, my liberal ideas, my religion, my sexual identity, and my 23 cats. (Once when he was a teen, I became so exasperated my a comment he made about my 13 cats, I told him to pick which ones he wanted to take to the pound. He dropped the subject.)

Of course I believe in miracles. Of course I send love and light to the grandchildren daily. But as the days tick by, does the possibilities of that day. For many years I comforted myself with the possibility of change. Of the grandchildren growing up and one day find me. Indeed, I believe that something new might one day be created, but that the past cannot be recreated.

I grieve my son and grandchildren as though they are dead. There is no relationship to connect us. If by some miracle, I began a relationship with Bella now, we've missed a lot of history. I haven't seen her grow up. I've never heard her call me grandma. The other two children have even less reality as I've not held them, seen them, known them for even a moment. Grief becomes a familiar companion, one easier to live with as years wear on, but constant.  Eventually it simply becomes part of your identity.

Stepping Outside the Social Grid

The Bali people's daily living takes shape around a system of ritual where Hinduism and agriculture meet. People in Bali depend upon an agrarian system to keep them fed. They work in rice paddies, and their survival depends upon each member of their society knowing exactly their role. Their rice growing society depends upon communal service: "Rice terraces require an unbelievable amount of shared labor, maintenance and engineering in order to prosper, so each Balinese village has a banjar--a united organization of citizens who administer, through consensus, the village's political and economic and religious and agricultural decisions. In Bali, the collective is absolutely more important than the individual, or nobody eats" (Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert).

Balinese people know exactly where they fit in the culture, from birth order to their place in the 13 rites of passages that mark their lives. The balance of their civilization depends upon conformity. So when you walk down the road and someone asks where you are going, you cannot reply "I'm just wandering" without distressing the inquirer. It is better to make up an answer than not offer a reply that fits their expectations. If someone inquires, "Are you married," it is better to reply "not yet" even if you are a lesbian, rabid feminist, 80-year-old nun.

On the one hand, what a comfort to always know exactly where you fit in your culture, your work, and your family. On the other hand, "different" disrupts their social grid to the point that they are distressed simply because you are not married. Or Hindu. Or fill-in-the-blank.On the other hand, what if you don't fit? What if your soul feels the urge to fly? Or to love someone of your own sex? What then?

And how different is that, truly, from our own culture? I live in South Carolina. I've lived in the Midwest or  South for 37 years. I struggle for authenticity in my life, claiming it as a banner. Waiving it around as my hope for salvation in a land of Christian fundamentalists and Southern culture. Yet I work in a place where the only Southerner is the owner. We have employees from Boston, California, and South Africa. We see a client base that is also "other" because of addiction. I've considered changing jobs, but don't dare do so. I'm lesbian. Not a safe to be publicly gay working for the local school system. The Christian fundamentalists won't tolerate it.

Cameron and I dream of living in a place where we both can find authenticity. As Cameron progresses along her path, identifying more and more as male, we both know transitioning here simply won't work. She has too many links to the past, to family, to those who won't understand. And while I was truly encouraged at the measure of support that came to the demonstration last week at Converse College, I also know I can't call five of those folks by name. They aren't present in my daily life offering support and strength. Moreover, we've not found our nitch spiritually here, either.

Guess we've stepped so far out of our cultural, social grid that we're having to define who we are, not by societal exceptions, but by our own intuition. But there are still many places that's not acceptable. Many places that still depend upon a social grid to provide identity and direction.