Bat Shit

In my coming out post, I joked that women are all bat shit crazy and they make me bat shit crazy just by being near them. What I should have said was something along the lines of a Chinese fortune cookie: "You will yearn for the women that you cannot have. Your lucky numbers are 5, 7, 17, and 23".

You see, when men don't like you romantically, you never hear from them again. That's a gross oversimplification of the behavior of an entire sex, but give me a little credit here. I unsuccessfully dated men in Texas for seven years. Seven looooonnng years of online dating, most of which I chronicled on my blog. I know how this rodeo works. After a first date, you'll only hear from a guy if he thinks the fledgling relationship is going to go somewhere on the second date. Preferably somewhere horizontal. There is no, "Let's just be friends and get to know each other".

Then there are women. Oh my Lord. I have never had so many "friends" as I do with female first dates. When women don't see the possibility of a romantic relationship, there is always the very real possibility that this woman will become your best friend forever and ever, Amen. This situation works out if both parties, mutually agree, that you are completely incompatible, yet share a deep, abiding love of say...rhesus monkeys and Kit-kat bars. Then you can be friends! Short of that situation, one person is doomed to be longing for the other because there is a reason you went on a date in the first place. At one point, in the not-so-distant past, you both found each other attractive enough to meet for tea/dinner/drinks. That attraction doesn't stop with the phrase, "I'd just like to be friends" even when it's joyfully texted at the end of the date with a smiley face (:-) to soften the blow.

So there is a doomed sense of longing. Within the lesbian community, this longing can go on for years and even decades. While trapped in this version of Dante's Inferno, the friend is  forced to listen to other person's stories about their third blind date with her mother's uncle's friend that's on a softball team with a girl she knew in the third grade or how they are still in love with their ex-girlfriend from two years ago although all they did was fight. All the while, you know (oh how you know!) that you would in fact make this person wildly happy if only you weren't banished to the Friend Zone.

And this is just one of the many reasons that women make bat shit crazy, even if they do text me with cute smiley faces.

Don't Try This At Home: 2

Of course, there is a downside to writing. There are people that I hurt; feelings that are abused with a misplaced comma or paraphrased quotation. But mostly, there is the cowardice. It's so much easier to write than it is to ask the question and listen through uncomfortable answers. My words block out the sound of other people's words while I'm typing, at least momentarily. It's by far the most self-absorbed act that I could thrust onto the hemisphere.

So when I can no longer write, I read. A non-reader will never fully understand what a reader sees in books. Trust me, I've dated too many non-readers to not fully comprehend this phenomenon. They don't understand the connection anymore than I understand a connection to a video game or to sports team. When I read a book, I get to enter another person's mind for an hour, a day, a week. I inhabit their thoughts and feel their characters. They carefully construct the plot and narrative for my, what seems like, exclusive enjoyment. I, the reader. Any reader. I am both annonymous and highly unique. So, tonight, I read.

Don't Try This At Home

Last night I was sitting around with some new friends, The (Hot) Officer and Chaps (who would like to be referred to as WildCat, but let's be honest, we don't always get to pick our nicknames in life. Note the oblique reference to me being called "BJ" for the first 10 years of my life).  These two women collectively own more guns than a small Montana militia, yet they warm the very marrow of my bones. I was sitting listening to Officer Hotness play her acoustic guitar and sing last night and thought that maybe I had gotten the short end of the artistic stick. I can't sing well, I definitely can't play guitar, and "Chopsticks" is as far as I can go on the piano. In between songs, I lamented: "All I can do is write, and that's never gotten me any women". She then told me that, much to my surprise, very few women had fallen captive to her musical charms. Chaps said that it was especially hard for her to woo women on a set of drums, which we collectively agreed would be difficult for no other reason than the approximate distance you would have to sit to watch a drum player work her magic. 

Then I wondered what kind of cold-hearted bastards Officer Hotness had been singing to. Is there anything sexier than a woman singing with an acoustic guitar? If I'm not careful, I'm going to become a coffee shop groupie. If only I could sit drinking espresso in a coffee house chair typing out on my laptop about my most personal feelings. Good thing I don't drink espresso and the comfortable chairs are always taken at coffee houses, but oh, what a cliche a could be. It's a slippery slope. I would be embarrassed to know me. But writing is what I do and it's not as easy as you might think. Writing a self-confessing blog about intimate details of my life may look like fun and games, but I'm wracked with self-doubt and questions. "Did I share too much? Did I share enough to be interesting? Have I asked enough hypothetical questions to drive my readers absolutely crazy? Three in a row - that's pretty good. Let's stop there. Clearly a paragraph break is in order".

Sometimes I'm startled about the conclusions that I come to at the end of a post. My fingers write themselves with a clarity that my conscious mind can't seem to muster. So I write. That is my art. I am a writer. I'm also an exceptionally good reader, but that's not really a participatory sport, so let's just stay with writing.

For a while, I was paid to write and, like most things, the act of getting paid to write on a deadline killed any sense of joy that I felt from the spontaneous act. They I started my degree and got a job where I sat in front of a computer and worked in Excel all day, every day, and occasionally talked to people on the phone. The only way that I got through that job was by putting in my headphones and listening to hard core rap. Listening to Jay-Z and Eminem rap about the gangster life and how hard it is to stay authentic in suburban America matched my soul-crushing angst.

Now when I'm at work I listen to Deb Talan or Indigo Girls radio on Pandora, trying to soothe away my stress in between my calls to strangers. It's been a slow process coming back to my writing, but I feel it lingering. It will be seven years in February that I moved to Texas and started my blog. Happy (early) anniversary to me.

Fear

I've been reading comments about my last post and I really had no idea that so many people from high school, college, and Houston would read what I wrote on my blog. Let's just catch everyone up to speed, m'kay. I started blogging seven years ago when I moved to Texas. I was pregnant with Zac (who I called Peanut at the time). The archives for that blog can be found here: http://www.pregnantblogger.blogspot.com/. I'm pretty sure that I started blogging under the name, "Pregnant in Texas" before I realized that was more of a temporary condition than a blog name might suggest. Then I switched to "Not So Pregnant in Texas". At some point, when I cared about unique page views and readers, I moved over to my own domain name. Then my boss read my blog after an unfortunate google search and I took everything down. At some later arbitrary point, I started this blog and here I am. If you were bored reading that last paragraph, don't worry, the feeling was mutual.

Anyways, my point before I got mired in seven years of history, was that I was terrified that I had made a huge mistake. I kept reading about how people thought I was brave and authentic and I kept thinking, "Do these people realize who they are talking to? I'm the antithesis of brave."  I started thinking about everyone that I was friends with, including: Clicker's Mom, my Mom, my Dad, the FOB (Father of the Baby)'s sister, women from work, men from work, and my Great Aunt. Yeah, instead of having a lot of awkward, one-on-one conversations with people, (which is how I assume most people come out) I just let social media do the dirty work for me.

I'm still waiting for the backlash, which will only be felt in backhanded comments, silent, furious looks,  or words left unspoken because the world is too politically correct to publicly denounce a gay daughter/sister/friend/coworker/fill-in-title-here. It's much easier to just pass a law refusing my right to marry or have health benefits or my partner's Social Security.  *sigh*

I worried about the FOB's family trying to come and take Zac. Then I remembered that they've only met him once when he was a baby and I don't have a home telephone number so it would be difficult to contact me. Here is a fun tidbit of information about where I live: In Texas, second-parent adoptions of children with two gay parents can't be done in Harris County, where Houston is located. Families go to San Antonio in Bexar County to join together legally. That's over four hours away. Here's another fun tidbit: A Harris County Family Court judge made it a crime for a  same sex parent to spend time, alone, with his partner's biological children. There was no history of alleged sexual, physical, or emotional abuse. He was just refused the right to be alone with the children that he was helping to raise because of his sexuality *sigh*.

Then there is work. Work, work, work. I work a lot and I try to find ways to write about work in the most obscure ways possible, which isn't easy. Work dominates my life and I'm expressly forbidden to share my feelings on "social media that might be read by clients, prospects, or business partners". Let me give you an example: I was sitting in my cube one day about two months ago and I got a call. The person on the other end of the phone call had googled my name and my company's name. Google came back with upteen million hits, but the first seven links correctly referred to me and my job. Three of the websites that contained my information were put together by third-party distributors who had gotten my licensing information through the Freedom of Information Act. I was told to remove the profile of me that I didn't create and then remove the link on Google. I'll wait why you digest that. Has anyone tried to remove a link or reference to a link on Google lately? I've insurance companies approve surgeries easier than I could remove links. I tried, though. Oh sweet baby God, I tried. I tried for six hours and I'm too afraid to try the search again to see what comes up.

So there's that. I'm a blogger, working at a company that actively discourages blogging, and what I really want to write about is what it's like to be a female advisor in this industry, but, I can't. I can't wait for the day that the same person calls me up to talk about this piece. I can't wait to explain what a "cache" is and how I can't remove it from the mystical land where Internets live.

My point, which I swear I left somewhere around this place, is that I wanted to say thank you for the kind comments, both here and on Facebook . I'm not brave at all. I'm still terrified, but the feeling is subsiding as more and more days pass and the sky hasn't rained with the blood of baby lams and throng of wasps. I'm here. Doing better than just fine. Feeling pretty good, actually. So thank you.

If Only This Blog Had an About Me Section

There is a lot that I need to come out about before I start this post. My fear with this blog has always been (and continues to be), "What if XXX reads it and won't care for me anymore?" or "What if I embarrass my parents (again) and it hurts them?" I have no real way to answer either question, but at some point, I can feel things building up inside me and my desire to spill out my ever-loving guts on the Internet comes busting out. So, without further ado....

1) I'M HERE AND I'M QUEER!

That's the first part that I need to come out about. After my relationship with Clicker ended, I moved into my house and things just felt different. Although I lie in bed at night and worry that I won't have enough money and will be forcibly evicted from my house, I feel more settled here in a way that's hard to explain. I look around my house, constantly amaze, and think, "Hell ya. This shit is MINE!" I've even changed my sleeping habits. I used to sleep curled up on the far right hand side of my bed, but now I sleep in the middle or diagonally across the whole thing. I think the whole process of sleeping as if I owned the bed (which I do) confuses my cat to no end, but I'm getting off point here. My point is that I moved into my house and the way I look at life started to change. I realized that I can take control of my happiness and not leave it up to fate, bad first dates, or my fear of being 'outed' as a bad daughter, woman, lover, mother, and co-worker.

The me that I am, that I've always been, has wanted to be with women - even though they are all bat-shit crazy and turn me bat-shit crazy, but that's another post all together. Let me go onto point number two that I want to come out about and you'll see how this all ties in together:

2)   I WANT ANOTHER BABY!

Whew, I'm glad I got that off my chest. There are a lot of guilt issues with me being a single Mom and knowing that my friends and family will most certainly not support the expansion of my family has been difficult.

So, there it is: I'm gay, single, raising an amazing six year-old, and constantly worrying about money. The only way I can stack this less in my favor would be if I had a physical or mental disability. I guess that would make the situation worse. Or I could hate babies. That would certainly put a damper on the "I want another baby" outing party.

Sometimes well meaning friends will tell me that I need to seriously consider having another baby again, by myself (again), and what that would mean to my family. As much as I love my friends, that question is total bullshit. Would I even be bringing up something like another baby if I hadn't already put serious thought behind it? In the six and a half years that Zac has been on this Earth, have I ever, ever mentioned wanting to gestate another human being by myself? That's a definite no to both questions. Never before in my writing or personal conversations have I talked about how or why I feel like this is a necessary part of my life.

I can even feel now that I'm failing to adequately express the complex emotions that would go into a decision like this. I'm not sure that I'll ever be able to, but I at least needed to put it out there that there that I think about it a lot, especially since I found out my company covers fertility treatments at 100% on our health insurance.

If either of these two bold (with exclamation points!!) announcements cause you to love or respect me less, then I'm sorry. I still love and respect you. Maybe one day you can open your heart and embrace all of me. Until then, I'll be waiting.

Year in Review

Yes, I'm still among the living. Occasionally, I even blog (although not often). Another year has gone by and since yesterday was my birthday (31!), I thought I'd do a year in review. Since my memory isn't nearly good enough to remember everything, I'll just go for the highlights and lowlights.

Highlights:

I became a Financial Advisor! I passed my Series 7 in January 2011 and passed my Series 66 and Insurance exams in February. I had some early success with my job, although I'm told at least two or three times a day that I'm not to talk about it in any social media forum. Consider this my way of not talking about it.

I've lost 45 lbs through lap band surgery on February 24, 2011:

There have been a lot of ups and downs with my post surgical stomach and life style. I can eat very, very little pasta and bread. Rice is a little dicey and any kind of gourmet food can make me sick after a couple of bits. I've never puked as much as I have since February (see lowlights), but I've made progress toward my weight loss goal.

I bought a house on July 29, 2011:

and I have remodeled and redecorated just about every room in the house. Here are some before and after photos:

Who could forget that awesome wall paper that I took down. This was my absolute first project in the house. Here's a close-up of the most awesome border ever:

Now the kitchen looks like this:

I also painted my fireplace white and destroyed the main bathroom (literally). I'll save those for another post.

We adopted Sam, who is so much happier in the house than she was in the apartment. I personally love that she blends in with my new shag carpet:

She's also getting ready for our first Christmas in our house (with a cameo from Clicker):

Zac started a new school on September 2, 2011. He had a hard time adjusting to his new school, but I think he's finally settled down. Knowing that we'll be in this house for at least the next seven years has helped. He has made friends with the four kids that live on our street and he's doing unbelievably well in his Gifted and Talented class. He's learning faster than I can keep up.

Lowlights:

Puking after every other meal. Literally. I puke so much that I'm starting to worry about tooth erosion. Once I start to get used to how much I can eat at any given meal, I get the band filled and all hell breaks out. I've also only lost 45lbs and I seem to be stuck at this weight. Exercise and fewer cheetos might be in order. I'm worried about getting the band filled more than 8cc's because I already have such food restrictions, but I may have to see my doctor again soon.

I didn't see my sister this year. She's in her third year of medical school in Maine and going on rotations in New Hampshire. The more she interacts with the general public, the better her stories get. I wish she and Zac could hang out. I hope they can see each other soon and I can get to spend some time with her.

All of October and most of November. Seriously. I wish that I could talk about it, especially here.

I lost a good friend. I can't mention her name in this forum, but I lost someone in my life and it's been difficult. I've mentioned several times that I don't have many friends in Texas, so to lose such a good friend, well, I continue to struggle with it.

Neighborhood bullies. Zac doesn't have a "Dad" that lives with us and some of the punks in the neighborhood tease him about it. To avoid further teasing about it, he told his first grade teacher that his Dad died when he was 3. We're in therapy now, although I'm not a huge fan of the therapist. Zac seems to like him though.

Love. Lot's of confusion over love this year. There have been some highlights, but a lot of lowlights as well.

Sam's need to chew and dig holes. I have gopher-sized holes in my backyard where she tries to attack the roots growing under the ground. The one next to the foundation is particularly worrisome. She's also eaten four pairs of high heels, to date, and two cherished, childhood ornaments that my Grandma made.

Here is to 2012!

Better (A Little)

Saying that I'm better is basically wishing that a giant asteroid would hit my head and destroy my house. I don't actually want that so I'll hedge my bets by saying that I'm a little better. The great sadness has mostly left me, although occasionally I don't want to leave the house, but I'm told that's normal. I'm going to so much therapy that it would pain me to actually talk about. Even better, the nicest improvement is that I can be at work without crying or constantly eyeing the exits, wishing that I had enough courage to run sprinting out the door instead of sitting miserably in my desk chair.

There have been a lot of trying times that I'm trying to put past me. There have been romantic, interpersonal, and professional struggles that are all still there to a degree, but ultimately, I am feel better.

Just felt like I should update and say that out loud (err..in my head, I mean).

I'm going on a date tonight with someone that makes me very happy to be around. It's like going on a little vacation because I forget all my troubles when I'm around them. I literally don't do any housework or spend anytime worrying about money (one of my least favorite past times that I seem to do quite a bit of. See: never leaving the house when upset).

I do want to tell you about this dog of mine, known as Samantha - or Sam for short. Sam is a holy terror. She sleeps in a crate and goes to the bathroom outside (at least 65% of the time, or so)

She looks all cute and cuddly in this picture, but that's before she's gained 15 pounds and decided that rules are for suckers. When I forget to put her in a crate before I take a nap, I wake up to a house that has been completely decimated. Everything in chewing reach has been chewed to oblivion and scattered through the living room, bedroom, and dining room. At last count, she has completely destroyed and/or eaten: half a bottle of Elmer's Glue, 32 crayons, a sponge, a shower scrub, every piece of newspaper or copy paper in the house, 4 stuffed animals not-so-lovingly donated by Zac, rope, curtain pulls, socks, wooden train tracks, and so many other items that I can't stop to think about right now because I might banish her outside.

This guy loves her, though:

He tells me at least once a night what a good dog Sam is. For me, I never knew that dog ownership could be quite so...destructive. Sam is fiercely loyal and protective of her family, almost to the point that I have to put her outside to answer the door when someone comes over because I'm afraid that she'll rip out their jugular before they have time to slip her a treat.

Let's not even talk about the dog's relationship to the cat. My cat, Piper, is queen of the household and knows it. She hisses and bats at Sam whenever the dumb dog tries to lick Piper on the head or play with her. Those two are going to run the shag carpets in this house with their tangle of claws. Piper usually looks to me for protection and has been known to leap long distances to avoid walking on the floor where the dreaded dog is. You've never seen a happy cat than the one that comes up on my bed at night and demands to be petted, once Sam is in her crate. Seriously.

Raising a family of four, even when two of them are animals, can be tough. I feel like I'm in a never ending game of the "Farmer and Dell" and sometimes I wonder if I'm the cheese that the mouse takes at the end. If the boy takes the dog and the dog takes a cat, I'd like to think I'm Brie or Gouda - something fancy at least.