Posted on by palmtreemomma

Happily Ever After

I spent my childhood outdoors, as much as possible. Making imaginary homes under the pine trees or tucked into a hillside. When the heat became too much to bear, my friends and I would spend long afternoons inside. We would raid my mom’s lingerie stash and dress up. There was a long flowing white gown with a matching robe that was perfect for playing bride. I spent hours imagining what it would be like to get married. Like most girls, I couldn’t wait for some prince charming to sweep me off my feet and live happily ever after.

Austin certainly did sweep me off my feet but the happily ever after part is still working itself out. Don’t get me wrong. We have many moments of happiness. But a good marriage takes a lot of work.

Studies show that nearly 50% of all marriages end in divorce. For those in Mixed Orientation Marriages, (MOM) only an average of 20% stay together.

Austin came out to me just before our 12th anniversary. That was nearly 11 years ago and we are still together. Not because of cultural or religious obligations. But because we wanted to make it work. Despite the pain, confusion and all the unknowns, we wanted to grow old together.

I’ve been working on a list of ideas. Things that have helped us do more than just survive these past 11 years. And I can’t wait to share these thoughts with you.

But it would all be pointless if I didn’t start here.

With Honesty.

Without honesty, there can be no happily ever after.

Before we were married, Austin struggled to decide whether or not to come out to me. Many he went to for advice said the same thing. That it would be best not to tell me. That it would just make it harder for me.

So we married and I was in complete ignorance. I feel at times that the whole world knew he was queer before I did. My gaydar was nonexistent, thanks to my conservative religious upbringing. I was led to believe that it was impossible for queer people to be Christians. It didn’t enter my mind that anyone around me could possibly be queer.

before

The early years of marriage were quite good. We had lots of fun. Didn’t fight. Traveled the world. I felt seen and loved in ways I never had before. We had a couple of babies. Settled into life. For a while it felt like happily ever after.

But unbeknownst to me, Austin was Bi. That part didn’t go away when he got married, as he had hoped. If he brought it up to a friend or counselor, they still gave the same advise. To not tell me. So he kept it to himself, cordoning off a very real part of who he is. Stuffing it deeper into the closet.

So much energy was being spent on hiding that he didn’t have the energy to truly live. Or love.

Here’s the thing. No matter who you are, how adept you are at stuffing and hiding, it takes its toll. So much energy was being spent on hiding that he didn’t have the energy to truly live. Or love.

Eventually, I picked up that something was wrong. I just didn’t know what. Couldn’t put my finger on it. But I knew that whatever it was, we were in trouble.

after

I’m glad Austin finally decided to come out to me. To bring his whole self to our marriage. But I have to be honest. The weight of hidden truths and in-authenticity grows over time. The cost of honesty grows the longer it goes. It was crushing to realize that the man I thought I had married was not who I had been led to believe he was. Everything we had was built on an illusion. It was a blow to my self-esteem and it tested all of the painstaking work I had done to heal from my own painful past. And now we had 3 little boys to think about. There was no way to just hit the pause button and figure things out.

If you’ve read my blog from the beginning, you will know that we found our way. Bit by bit. But it was difficult. Many straight spouses decide not to stay and I get that.

It’s not easy to realize the person you love the most has been hiding something from you.

I know that Austin had his reasons. But this is not a post about him. This is a post about how those reasons ended up hurting me. How his decision devastated me.

If you are in the closet, wondering whether or not to come out to the person you love, this post is also for you. If you love someone, that person deserves your honesty. They deserve to see the whole you. And you deserve to be able to show them the whole you. It’s true that they could leave you, scattering pieces of your broken heart in the mud. Yet, wouldn’t you rather be seen and loved for who you really are than them loving a fake version of yourself that you have to work so hard to keep up with? If it is meant to be, you will both find your way through and will have a love story of the century.

You must learn to love your whole self before you can truly love others. There is no happily ever after without honesty. Without stepping into wholeness and authenticity. You deserve it. The person you love deserves it too.

to the gatekeepers

My final thoughts are for the larger community, especially religious communities. The shame that keeps people in the closet starts with you. I hate to break it to you, but you are the gatekeepers that lead to much pain. Sometimes broken marriages. Or depression. Sometimes even suicide. There are more mixed-orientation marriages among you than you will ever know. So much unnecessary pain. Hiding. Betrayal.

Imagine, instead, being gatekeepers of authenticity. Honesty. Thriving. Imagine creating a community where no one has to hide a part of themselves in order to be accepted. The love and life that would flow from a place like that just might be enough to heal the broken world.


Click on the button above to send me an email and I will let you know when new posts are up! If you or someone you love is in the closet, or if you are struggling with your own guttural grief and need someone to talk to, email me. I may not have time to answer you but I will read it and hold you in my heart.

Posted on by palmtreemomma

Coming Home

In my last post, I wrote about leaving toxic places, touching on the grief that surfaces when we realize certain places or people are no longer safe for us.

I need to dive in a little deeper, to the pain of grieving something we never had.

Grief is necessary when we lose something precious. When processed well, grief can be good and beautiful, true praise of what we have lost. Proof that something beautiful was in our lives.

“Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

Alfred Lord Tennyson

grieving something we never had


Yet sometimes grief grabs us in the deepest places and holds on because instead of grieving what we lost, we may be grieving something we never had in the first place.

The child in the closet who pretended she was straight to maintain her place of belonging in the family, will someday have to grieve never actually belonging to that family. The boy who raised himself while caring for a parent does not weep because his father died. His tears are shed instead for the father he never had. And never will. The woman who has always struggled to feel beautiful because as a child, a boy publicly humiliated her and labeled her as disgusting. She does not weep for the loss of popularity, she weeps because she has never felt seen as beautiful. The parent who is triggered into deep anxiety when facing food insecurity because of a global pandemic is not grieving today’s hardships. He is grieving a childhood that never knew that security.

Sometimes we grieve because we have lost something. But there is an equally bottomless pain of grieving something we never had in the first place.

For all who grieve and feel the pain of loss over things that never existed – yet should have existed – you are not alone. Some losses feel forever and stretch beyond human reasoning and comprehension.

This loneliness, this deep and utter feeling of betrayal, loss and isolation is exhausting.

coming home

And yet, when the song and dance is over, when the dust clears and all that is left is the raw authenticity of our lives.

Those moments where we were the truest to ourselves.

The best versions of who we could be.

With startling clarity, we can look around and realize that there is something inside of us that has outlived the betrayal, grief and losses of life.

We want to engineer a world where everyone admires us, holds us in high esteem. Where safety and security are the norm. We try so hard to control the outcome of the broader story yet all we can really do is control our own narrative. When all else has been lost or is out of our control, we can and must speak our own narrative. Make our own way. Belong to our self.

Perhaps the only way to find our true place of belonging starts with coming home to our self. Belonging to our self.

This is not a journey I can guide you on because this journey will not look the same for any one of us. Our journey of coming home to our self is as unique as each of us.

It’s taken me decades to truly come home to, and belong to, my self. More often than not I wished I could trade in my self for another one braver, more beautiful, stronger, more articulate, and better than this one. Yet I finally love her. More than being shaped by her experiences, she now experiences life by the shaping of her narrative.

By belonging to her self, she holds the pen in her story. No matter what she gains or loses, she knows she will always have her self.

And she is more than okay.


Click on the button above to send me an email and I will let you know when new posts are up! If you or someone you love is in the closet, or if you are struggling with your own guttural grief and need someone to talk to, email me. I may not have time to answer you but I will read it and hold you in my heart.

Photo courtesy of Adrienne Gerber Photography.

Posted on by palmtreemomma

Leaving Toxic Places

I find myself feeling a lot of things these days. Sadness. Happiness. Grief. Hope. Anger. Relief. Waking up in a polarized world that keeps getting a little more chaotic every day has given me the gift of clarity. So many places once familiar are now strange to me. Places of belonging that have turned toxic bring me no small amount of sadness. Keeping the raw edge of grief sharp. I look around me at people I once categorized as “my people” and it is as if I am looking at a crowd of strangers.

It’s unsettling. Waking up in a strange place. The grief is nuanced and layered. But at the heart of it, there is a loss of belonging. And when that loss is realized, brought to the surface and given space to metabolize and flow, I realize there is not much point in staying connected to a place or a relationship where I no longer belong. Especially when that place has become toxic.

The word belonging means happiness felt in a secure relationship. It is rooted in the idea of being suitable or fitting to something or someone. Toxic comes from a Greek phrase that literally meant poison used on arrows.

Toxic places

Arrows harm. Poisoned arrows destroy.

It’s more than a little startling to wake up in a place that is toxic. Where there is intent to harm and destroy. What is even more disconcerting is to see people you had imagined were safe and good, dipping their arrows into poison. Metaphorically speaking of course.

Some of us still have a painfully difficult time attempting to leave these places behind. Belonging is so deeply wired into our DNA. We need “place”. Safety. Belonging.

But when a particular place is no longer safe, you no longer belong there. Your relationship is neither happy nor secure. You might as well leave.

leaving

Give yourself time and space to grieve the loss. But whatever you do, don’t remain in that toxic place. If your church, marriage, family, friendships, workplace, social group, whatever, has become a place of poison instead of a place of safety, get out. It’s okay to leave. Okay to risk disappointing others. To make waves. To let down the people who have long ago let you down.

You matter.

Your safety matters.

Happiness and well being. These things matter.

Let your gut be your compass. The beautiful thing is that there is a place you belong to. If you are leaving toxicity behind, you may not yet know that new place. But it is there. And the only way you will find it is by leaving behind all that would poison you.

You may have to create it. Build it. Find your own people and start anew. But you can do this.

some extra help

I recently began EMDR with my therapist. Simply put, EMDR is a psychotherapy that enables one to heal from emotional distress that stems from past experiences. The thing about trauma is that when it is physically over, a part of our brain stays stuck in the event. This causes our bodies to react to current day events as if we were still experiencing that past trauma.

For me, it’s seeing my husband lay back and close his eyes. Particularly in the middle of the day. Or the middle of a conversation. It may be a normal reaction on his part. Of simply being tired. Or having a headache. But my body goes into a flight mode and I have an irresistible urge to leave the room. It takes everything I have to remain physically present.

Such a simple thing but it has a very powerful effect on my body. It subconsciously transports me back into an old trauma, as if that were the event happening today instead of my husband just being tired and needing to withdraw for a minute.

My therapist described EMDR as a way to connect the right side of our brain to the left side. So that the part that thinks it is still in the traumatic event can finally and truly understand that it is over.

my own way out

We began the EMDR process by creating a safe space in my mind that I could go to if it became too much to bear at any point in the therapy. Then, we chose an event from the past, to begin with, using tapping instead of eye movement. Part of the process involves fully entering the memory and all the feelings that go with it. We identified the negative cognition or thoughts that went with the event. For me, it was “I’m not good enough.” But when it came time to replace the negative cognition with a positive one, all the while staying in that past event, I really struggled.

But then I had a light bulb moment. I knew that my positive cognition had to be this – I am my own way out. I knew that what I was feeling was not so much that I wasn’t good enough, but that I was trapped. Using tapping, I was able to re-tell the story of my past. I gave myself a voice and freedom. Became my own way out.

I cannot, simply cannot, in the language of mankind, tell you how powerful this is for me.

changing the past

When my Grandpa passed away, I was processing another memory on my own. That phrase came to me again and I went back into the memory and found the little girl that was so hurt and confused. I talked to her and showed her who she would become. I told her how she was her own way out.

While we cannot change the past, we can change our perspective of it by changing our relationship to it. It is possible to bring an end to past trauma.

To the little girl I meet in my memories and to all of you who find yourself stuck either in toxic places or toxic memories, you are your own way out. You belong, not to those poisonous places, but to a new place that hears you, sees you and values you.

The world is big and wide and beautiful. There is enough. You are enough. If you are not in a place that tells you this every day, then go and find that place.

You are your own way out.


Click on the button above to send me an email and I will let you know when new posts are up! If you or someone you love is in the closet, or if you are struggling with your own guttural grief and need someone to talk to, email me. I may not have time to answer you but I will read it and hold you in my heart.

Posted on by palmtreemomma

Let Go

New Year’s Eve often finds me perched in my room. Away from the noise and parties. Just me and my thoughts. I sit and ponder the year gone by and listen to hope, as she whispers new lines for the year ahead. Eventually, a word or phrase finds me and I know it is to be my mantra for the coming year.

My word(s) for this year were slower to come, but no less real when they did show up.

Let go.

No way!

You’re kidding, right? I do not like that particular combination of words. Never have. Never will.

They have become synonymous with a certain kind of self-disregard that was subtly held up as God’s ultimate plan and pleasure.

Looking back now it seems clearly twisted. Equating Divine Love with the call to self-sacrifice and personal pain. As if the reason for my existence was to serve others and give up whatever dreams and hopes I may have had for myself.

It has been a long journey to come to a very different realization – that my hopes and dreams and wants are good things. My pleasure mirrors that of the Divine, rather than being in dissonance with it.

And while there is much that could be written about that journey, it would take us off topic. So back to that phrase.

Let Go

Almost as soon as the “what the heck?” thought entered my mind, I was given a picture of what a healthy letting go could look like. Like a stream that branches into two smaller creeks, each being connected to and a vital part of the whole, two things began to separate and lengthen in my mind.

First, honesty. Being honest with myself about what I really want. What I need. Desire. Passion. Longing. It’s a brave and utterly honest look at all I am feeling and needing. Admitting it. Owning it.

Secondly, it’s telling myself that I will be okay, even if I don’t get that thing that I really want and need.

It was a light bulb moment for me. Maybe I was never really able to let go of things in the past because I had not had the courage or permission to wildly feel and be honest about what it is that I wanted. You can’t let go of something you are in denial about. It will own you. Haunt you. Control you.

But raw honesty about all that flows and rumbles through this human body is a beautiful and freeing thing.

Within hours of coming to this realization, I began to have physical symptoms that would later be diagnosed as COVID. As the first aches began to take over my body, I admitted how much I wanted to feel good. How hard I had worked for a very long time to be healthy. To protect my own body and the lives of my friends and neighbors.

Then I told myself that I would be okay even if I did not have those things.

I let go.

And with it I found the courage to look at many more places in my life where fear was holding my fingers tight.

Yes, I want it very much. But yes, I will be okay even if I don’t have it.

2021 is here. and I am practicing letting go.

Click on the button above to send me an email and I will let you know when new posts are up! If you or someone you love is in the closet, or if you are struggling with your own guttural grief and need someone to talk to, email me. I may not have time to answer you but I will read it and hold you in my heart.