I Know This Much Is True
Jul. 28th, 2004 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plumtreeblossomI want to say thank you again for the kind, supportive words yesterday. A vicious and hurtful voicemail left by a family member last night was followed up by a tearful apology this morning, thus bringing us to another stalemate for a while. This will last a few months until I’m again planted in the hot seat.
I could accept status as the family’s black sheep if I thought I’d truly earned it. Lets say I were a chronic drug user, or a lazy indigent who won’t work, or even an obnoxious fanatic of some cause that offends them... then I could accept their distain for my lifestyle. But given the fact that I’ve walked an essentially straighter and narrower path than any of my living relatives, and have largely avoided any but the smallest and most correctable crises, the ostracism feels undeserved.
My crimes in this family are being socio-culturally different, and being as yet unmarried. The first has been with me since my early teens and I’m simply used to it. In a family of staunch Republicans (both the Jewish and Christian sides are hardcore Republican conservatives), I have always been drawn to the arts, to assorted cultures and sub-cultures that interested me, to creativity and to the often unconventional. In my family, this is the equivalent to mental illness. I can live with that dismissal and have never felt cause to defend my sanity outside the family. I basically do the same things everyone else does – I shop for groceries, I work a job and go on vacations, I live with pets and a roommate, and I have many friends. I may be a touch eccentric, but within the context of my community, I live a life as normal as rain.
The more immediate and difficult struggle with my family is that I am as yet "un-husbanded." Marriage is the sole marker of adulthood and responsibility in my family, and love has nothing to do with it. It is better, they feel, to be unhappily married than not married at all. Romantic love is, they feel, a sentimental desire to be put away with childish things, perhaps dreamed about in hazy retrospect, but certainly not held out for, especially at my "advanced" age. Their urging, which becomes more and more attack-oriented with each year, is for me to grab and wed the very first sperm-factory who will agree to it, lack of love notwithstanding. To them, and person who is financially stable and with whom one can endure the necessary pro-creative sex is marriage material.
There is a particular unmarried in-law who they have been shoving at me for five years. He is a 48-year-old man with no interests or hobbies who has never been outside of Upstate New York, is horribly out of shape physically and mentally, is a cashier at Rite-Aid and lives in his father’s den. Because of my refusal to move back to Rochester and marry this man, I am these things: Lesbian. Man-hater. Castrator. Irresponsible bohemian. Dreamer who is fooling myself.
Please don’t misunderstand; I am not anti-marriage and would love to find and spend my life with a soulmate (married or not). But for me, such a union can only be based on love. I have been deeply and powerfully in love – I know what love feels like, and I know what a loveless relationship feels like. I have tried things their way, dated men I felt no connection or love with because I was trying to convince myself it was better than nothing. It wasn't. I know that while being in a loving and true relationship is my first choice, being alone would be second. Being in a bad relationship would be my last choice.
I am effectively disinherited until I am married. That may happen, but if it does it will be base exclusively on love. Until then, I remain the black, black sheep who will settle for nothing less than what my heart knows is right.
Baaaa.
I could accept status as the family’s black sheep if I thought I’d truly earned it. Lets say I were a chronic drug user, or a lazy indigent who won’t work, or even an obnoxious fanatic of some cause that offends them... then I could accept their distain for my lifestyle. But given the fact that I’ve walked an essentially straighter and narrower path than any of my living relatives, and have largely avoided any but the smallest and most correctable crises, the ostracism feels undeserved.
My crimes in this family are being socio-culturally different, and being as yet unmarried. The first has been with me since my early teens and I’m simply used to it. In a family of staunch Republicans (both the Jewish and Christian sides are hardcore Republican conservatives), I have always been drawn to the arts, to assorted cultures and sub-cultures that interested me, to creativity and to the often unconventional. In my family, this is the equivalent to mental illness. I can live with that dismissal and have never felt cause to defend my sanity outside the family. I basically do the same things everyone else does – I shop for groceries, I work a job and go on vacations, I live with pets and a roommate, and I have many friends. I may be a touch eccentric, but within the context of my community, I live a life as normal as rain.
The more immediate and difficult struggle with my family is that I am as yet "un-husbanded." Marriage is the sole marker of adulthood and responsibility in my family, and love has nothing to do with it. It is better, they feel, to be unhappily married than not married at all. Romantic love is, they feel, a sentimental desire to be put away with childish things, perhaps dreamed about in hazy retrospect, but certainly not held out for, especially at my "advanced" age. Their urging, which becomes more and more attack-oriented with each year, is for me to grab and wed the very first sperm-factory who will agree to it, lack of love notwithstanding. To them, and person who is financially stable and with whom one can endure the necessary pro-creative sex is marriage material.
There is a particular unmarried in-law who they have been shoving at me for five years. He is a 48-year-old man with no interests or hobbies who has never been outside of Upstate New York, is horribly out of shape physically and mentally, is a cashier at Rite-Aid and lives in his father’s den. Because of my refusal to move back to Rochester and marry this man, I am these things: Lesbian. Man-hater. Castrator. Irresponsible bohemian. Dreamer who is fooling myself.
Please don’t misunderstand; I am not anti-marriage and would love to find and spend my life with a soulmate (married or not). But for me, such a union can only be based on love. I have been deeply and powerfully in love – I know what love feels like, and I know what a loveless relationship feels like. I have tried things their way, dated men I felt no connection or love with because I was trying to convince myself it was better than nothing. It wasn't. I know that while being in a loving and true relationship is my first choice, being alone would be second. Being in a bad relationship would be my last choice.
I am effectively disinherited until I am married. That may happen, but if it does it will be base exclusively on love. Until then, I remain the black, black sheep who will settle for nothing less than what my heart knows is right.
Baaaa.