Tag Archives: retrospective

New Years Perspective

In 2006 I reflected. For 2007 the five most memorable moments are:

1. Looking down and seeing a positive pregnancy test. I went into the other room and picked up Noah’s hand and pulled him bodily into the bathroom to look with me without saying anything. It was overwhelming.
2. Looking at the ultrasound screen and seeing the alien growing inside my belly for the first time. Now that’s proof.
3. Watching a gorgeous sunrise on a boat with my favorite person in the world.
4. Snuggling with Crystal and sharing all of the deep down scary stuff.
5. Camp Everytown was more than a moment, but it is a time of my life I will never forget.

And to copy what happened in 2005 Post a New Year’s resolution that you think I should do. Then post this in your own LJ, and see what resolutions people think you should do.

I think I am going to crack open a bottle of sparkling cider soon. If I make it till 9pm I will be shocked.

Change {meme-ish}

tshuma posted this : Somewhat paraphrased – You’re given the chance to live your life over, with your current personality and mind. You can go back to any part of your life and start over.

To narrow down the reasons a bit and clarify: you have your current personality and knowledge of your current life history, but not the world’s. You can change events of your life by avoiding a car crash that crippled you, but you don’t know about assassinations or the events of September 11. You don’t know to invest in Microsquish stock at its IPO and you can’t test out of high school at the age of six. On the plus side, Star Wars in the theater will still be an awesome experience.

Given how I have been feeling lately, this is an interesting question. Given what I know now, I would have stayed with Aunt Vonnie and Uncle Bob starting from the first time I was sent to live with them when I was 6. I would have avoided my father like the plague. If I had stayed with Auntie then I couldn’t have been blamed for Tommy’s accident, though I bet it would have happened anyway. I wouldn’t have been seriously molested. I wouldn’t have been raped. I wouldn’t have the same severe abandonment issues from my mother pushing me around to dozens of different people. I wouldn’t have gone to 25 schools before graduating from high school.

There would have been other issues, and I know that–but I would have been better off. Staying with them would have changed almost everything that really hurt me. I would have found other things to get hurt by, but I have to wonder if they would have been as shattering. We lived up in the mountains in a sheltered place. It’s kind of weird wondering what I would be like if I had been sheltered from bad stuff. Would I be so strong? Would I be able to stand up against things that are wrong? I don’t know. I suspect so, but that’s a coulda shoulda woulda.

But it doesn’t matter what I would like to have changed. Cause this is where I am. And I have to figure out how to pick up the pieces. I’m glad I have Noah. He makes it a whole lot easier.

Timeline of insanity.

 

Three years ago today my favorite dance partner, terpsichoros took me to my first DHP. I went because I heard it was wild and exciting. There was also this other boy going and I wanted to flirt with him a lot. Tom and I had very tentatively opened our relationship in December though sex wasn’t permitted with anyone until January. I was on a mad hunt for new people because the near celibacy of the previous year and some were just too much for me. At this DHP I ended up sandwiched between the boy I was crushing on and the strange host of the party. I never did figure out what made him go for me so hard that night.

I went out on first dates with the host of that party and the boy I was crushing on within a week. 🙂 The other boy was an intermittent part of my life for about a year in a very casual way. But uhm… the host, that would be Noah, didn’t end up being casual. At that time he had a primary and I had a primary and I had a lot of rules governing how much contact I got to have without outside people and there were time restrictions on how quickly anything could happen. Which means that on my first date (2/26) with Noah I told him that there would be no sex. Given what a pushy tramp he is he still was very pushy and forward sexually and that pushiness very nearly made it so that he didn’t get a second date. But I spent time with him, often going to the gym with him, and talking over the next few weeks. About a month later we finally had sex and it was ok. 🙂

We got closer and more emotionally intimate. He became the first and only person to ever ask me, “What happened to you?” He is still the only person to ever care that way for me. He wants to see me. We dated until late November. During this period I was the one insisting that I was still just a secondary. He was very enamored of the idea of my being a co-primary with the other girl he was involved with. I had the sneaky suspicion this wasn’t actually ok with her at all and later it was discovered that I was basically right. I broke up with him because I would not be “co-primary” and I didn’t want to come second behind her. I wanted to be the Most Important Person to someone and as long as I was so obsessed with Noah and enraptured with him I couldn’t look for that. It never entered into my head to ask him to change the nature of his relationship with the other girl. That would not have been ok in my head.

So I dumped him, hard. It wasn’t pretty for either of us. It didn’t take long (maybe a month or so) and even though I was pretty certain that a Relationship wouldn’t work I just couldn’t stay out of his bed. Ok, maybe the sex was better than ok. 🙂 But I tried to keep distance there. Then I made a nine month mistake commonly referred to by short hand as “Puppy.” During that period I managed to stay out of Noah’s bed through sheer force of will and desperation to find something that might work somewhere else. Noah was still very much my best friend. His relationship with the other girl went away with much drama. He dated other people, some for short periods some for longer. He started dating a very nice, gentle girl while I was early on in my mistake. I thought he was happy. I was trying so hard to be happy.

Then, by a year after breaking up with him, I was single again and stopping to look at my life and what I wanted. I was still spending time with my wonderful best friend. I was still pretty completely obsessed with him. I dreamed about him. I thought about him all the time. I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t want to ruin his happy relationship with the new girl, I had broken up with him and I didn’t deserve him anymore. Though I did have active plans to ask him to knock me up when I was 26/27 because I couldn’t imagine a better co-parent.

But in March, two days before the second anniversary of the first time we had sex, he came over to have dinner and hang out. We did that often without it turning into anything other than friendship. This time he told me that he wanted me more than anything, that he wanted to marry me and spend forever with me, and even though he believed I would say no–he had to ask or he wouldn’t be able to forgive himself. I sat there in stunned shock for a couple minutes trying to find words. He believed this meant I was trying to figure out how to break it to him gently that I didn’t want him and started stammering out how he knows it won’t work and I don’t want him and… I told him to shut up and launched myself at him and told him yes. Yes, I would marry him. Yes, I want him. We did kiss, but very specifically on both our parts we kept all clothing on. He uhhh was still with the other girl. We talked about how much it was going to hurt her and I was very sad there was no way that I could see for all of us to be happy. I wasn’t going to give up on him again though, not for anything.

He broke up with her. It was uncomfortable and hard. I really have nothing negative to say about how she responded at all–there would have been no better way for her to be. Noah and I started trying to figure out how we fit together without any one else being between us. It was actually a slow warm up. Even though we were sort of technically engaged already we tried to not be instantly together all the time or enmeshed. We only saw one another a couple times a week for a few months. We didn’t advertise how seriously we were taking the relationship for a while. I told him that it was important to me that he not just be exchanging one full time girl for another full time girl. We had to be seperate for a while before we could be together. That sort of worked. The warm up was slow-ish (I’m honest) and good. We started making plans for the future.

One thing we talked about a lot was selling this house and renting for a while so that we could build up a more significant deposit on a better house. Eventually this plan was vetoed for a variety of reasons, but not before his then housemate moved out. It was June by then (whoo hoo, three whole months later) and I was experiencing plagues and pestilence in my apartment. (The flooding from the upstairs toilet and the bug infestations were just Not Funny.) Given that he needed to have some help with his mortgage it looked like he might have to get a new housemate. But… my apartment was sucking… So given that I would be moving in sometime in the near future anyway I just moved in then. Then I ran off to the east coast on vacation and started proceedings for the gorgeous ring that is mine.

We spent the summer trying to figure out how/if poly was going to work for us. Yeah, most of what we figured out is that poly is a fucking headache. We were also talking about the ominous cloud of wedding planning hanging over our heads. Then I got sick. And people were sweet and wonderful and tried to be helpful in convincing me that going to a doctor would be a good idea. In this process they told me that some of my symptoms could potentially indicate a very serious illness that could kill me. While in the midst of freaking out at the idea that I could die I looked over at Noah one night before going to bed and said, “If it turns out I am dying, can we go get married this weekend so that at least I get to be married to you before that happens?” He agreed. So I went to the doctor–uhm yeah… not dying. I’ll be fine. Well don’t I feel silly. So I came home all sheepish and told Noah that I wasn’t dying. He was happy about this. I sat there and fussed and dawdled as I worked my way up to saying, “So uhm, would you be interested in getting married this weekend anyway?”

This was on Thursday before Labor Day weekend. We found a lovely B&B up in Tahoe, booked a room for the weekend and drove up on Friday. We bought a pretty dress and lovely gold rings on the way (my “real” ring still hadn’t arrived). We had a lovely night enjoying our last night of sin before we became all legally sanctioned. The wedding was small (us and the minister) and quick. We said our own vows and I had moments of terror–oh god, what if I am FUCKING UP?!!!! But I stomped that voice out ruthlessly. We went back to the B&B and had a lovely dinner and enjoyed our wedding pint of Haggen Das vanilla ice cream–it’s all about priorities. 🙂 We drank port and enjoyed one another very much.

By late September neither of us were dating anyone else. The poly headache just kind of… was shelved. We fell more and more deeply into enjoying one another and figuring out the rocky bits of how to deal with one another (I may be harder than average to handle, but Noah has his moments too). Meeting his family over Thanksgiving was an experience I will never forget, or need to repeat.

We had a lovely fun Christmas season with some really hot people, but have been really cheerfully monogamous for the past couple months. Given that breeding is in the pretty near future it looks like monogamy will continue to be the mode for the forseeable future. Yeah, we are crazy enough to want to breed and to do it soon.

Do I know this relationship will work out? No. I’m really hoping. I believe that a lot of what makes relationships work is wanting to make them work and I think we both have a very high level of investment in making this work. I love him. I like him. I think this has at least as much potential as any other relationship and more than a good many. So I’m hoping.

Thank you terpsichoros. I owe you more than I can ever repay. You gave me dancing, which I love, and you introduced me to my future. Did you have any idea what you were doing? 🙂

Sarah asked…

“What were the five most memorable moments for you in 2006? Happy, sad, weird – moments that stuck in your mind and flash by when you think of the year.”

1. Looking at Noah and for one split second being terrified that I was making a huge mistake but then realizing that no, being married by a Walrus really was for the best. (Ok, seriously: I had this moment where I knew I was absolutely making the right decision. It was wonderful.)
2. Meeting Noah’s parents. Ok, I’ve done it.
3. Having my best friend over for dinner and sitting on the floor eating it off of Hercules plates and getting into the juicy bits of our respective psyches’ and hearing him tell me, “I think you will say no but I will never forgive myself if I don’t ask. Will you marry me?” Ok, so given that this was Noah there were like 75 more words in that brief little sentiments and lots of repeating himself… but my memory is good at condensing. 🙂
4. When I was about 25 seconds into the agony of my first tattoo appointment when I stopped and went, “Holy shit. What the FUCK am I doing?!?!!!!!” I’m still working on it anyway.
5. Strangely I think the last one was on my trip to New York. That was my first serious trip like that alone. I got to be dependent only on myself in a way I have never been before. I was so terribly lonely for most of it–I am so needy when it comes to my support network. I’m going to mention specifically the desk guy at the hostel who developed a mad crush on me during that week of being in the building. 🙂 He was sweet.