How sad is it that I am so excited the MC still likes me today? I came out to her yesterday. Rather nonchalantly, I thought. After briefly playing the gender game (“my partner and I…”) she asked what my “boyfriend” does. “Well, she is temping right now, but she’s really a playwrite….” MC said, “Oh” and went on to talk some more about her kids.
This morning… I don’t know what I expected. But she pulled out pictures she had brought in especially to show me. Pictures of all of her children and family. Six kids. The youngest, her twins, are 16. She is clearly so proud of them. The way her eyes crinkle up, how she can’t help grinning when she talks about them. That is so true.
Her face soon changed expressions and she looked forlornly at me. Surely, this is where she’d play the scolding mother and tell me about how I need a good man so that I can have kids someday. “Ah…. It’s your last day,” she said. She told me she’d miss me, as she’s been telling me for the past week.
No change. My coming out hadn’t made a difference at all. But I really thought it would. And that is so discouraging to me.
In all my time with E, I’ve never balked at the thought of people knowing we were together. I’m proud to walk around town with that beautiful redhead on my arm. I don’t hesitate to throw my arm around her in the grocery store. I truly love giving her a little peck on the cheek (or lips) if she says something truly adorable (which she does… often… wherever we are). I don’t care if strangers have a problem with us. It doesn’t matter. They have no place in my life, so why should their opinion of me hold such sway.
But I have this deep-seated urge for people to accept me. People I know and respect/care about. And my sexuality has somehow become a “logical” reason for people not to. This is what our culture has reduced me to. Expecting people to hate me for loving whom I love. And not because we are not of the same race. Not because my partner if half Jewish. But because she is a woman.
It sickens me that this “logic” is so ingrained in me that I don’t even think about it. Here I am, entering the workforce for the first time since becoming involved with E, stressing over what people will think or do when they find out I don’t have a boyfriend or husband, but rather a girlfriend and, hopefully, future-wife. The feeling just rises up, unbidden, throwing in my face just how much a product of our culture I really am.
Phewie….