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I am a grown-up. Well, most of the time. But Facebook adds an element to my life sometimes that makes me feel like a gangling, unattractive 14 year old who wasn’t invited to the slumber party. It is a weird phenomenon to read about a bunch of my friends who got together and didn’t invite me. Now, I don’t intellectually think I need to be invited to everything. In fact, if I was invited, I might have even declined because we have a lot going on. And often on the weekends I am near socially phobic because I have talked to so many people that week in my professional life and I just want to chill. But when a bunch of “friends” post on Facebook about the great time they had together, and I wasn’t invited, it hurts my feelings sometimes. But this isn’t an article about my feelings. I’ll deal with my feeling on my own time. This is an article about this weird time we live in with social media and technology in general. Our parents didn’t have to deal with this! Their friends didn’t have Bridge parties and then post about it on Facebook. Talking about it would have been impolite. I can’t imagine one of my mom’s friends saying to her, “We had a party last night with about 20 people and we had a great time, but we just couldn’t invite you. But let me show you some pictures of us having fun. You are friends with all of us, so I am sure you would like to see them, wouldn’t you?” NO! Because it would be bad manners. But this is exactly what happens on Facebook all the time. I am not sure what our new etiquette around social media should be. Should we all just toughen up? I have a friend who has lots of friends and she is also troubled by this. When she invites a few people over, and they post on Facebook, her other...
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On August 30, 2013 we celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary. This is obviously a big deal for us. We never had a honeymoon, so we went to Europe for a month this summer. Also, we decided to take our kids. We figure we have about 5 more years before they’re teenagers, and we didn’t want to leave them behind. I find that even though our 10th anniversary has passed, I am not quite done with it yet. For whatever reason, this 10 year anniversary date had lots of meaning for me. Maybe more than any other date. I am not a person that remembers all the important dates. I remember birthdays for my family and my anniversary. I don’t connect to death dates although I know other people do and try to be aware of those days. My mother connects with those days and she is the family archivist. I am reassured that she has all that information even though I don’t always want to know it. Anyway, I wanted to post a few pictures from our wedding and I wanted to tell you a little bit about it. We got married right after same-sex marriage became legal in 2003. We had been in Canada about a year. We knew we wanted to get married. We had even talked about me establishing residency in Belgium by living there for 6 months so we could marry there. Marriage was an extremely important value for us and if there was a way to marry, we were going to do it. My brother visited in June, right after it was legal in Ontario, and we would have done a small intimate wedding while he was here, but since I had a foreign divorce (we were shocked to find that the USA divorce needed a written legal opinion from a Canadian lawyer), we had to submit the necessary paper work and wait. That led to planning a wedding later in the summer and then we figured we might...
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To my husband, You are the love of my life. You make my life richer, fuller, more interesting and so full of love. When we decided to join our lives together I had dreams of flowers and romance and making each other happy. And there have been days like that. But the reality of our marriage has been so much more complex. We challenge each other and take on big challenges and lifetime commitments together. We make life changing decisions together. Marriage involves an intimacy that takes my breath away when I allow myself to think about it. You have seen me at my worst and you love me anyway. You have been so incredibly mad at me and still you love me so much. The intimacy of that love year after year is astounding. At every juncture there is a choice to keep committing to our love or to get annoyed, give up and stop. Every time, you choose love. I know you love me because of how you care for our lives. The evidence of the love you have for our family is all around us. It is clear in the way you care for our children and make time for them. It is in the grass you cut, in the swimming pool you maintain, it is in the white picket fence that lines our 2-acre property that you repair and replace pickets for each year. A couple of years ago someone recommended we replace that fence with something that would require less maintenance. I couldn’t imagine trading it in–it is a symbol for me of the love in our lives. Your love shows when you give me the car with the gas tank full and make sure the oil gets changed. We haven’t chosen an easy life, but one full of love and care. You show me that love every day. When we got married, I thought marriage was about love and kisses but what I know now is that being...
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After deciding to try being in a relationship with Mel, I had to try to figure out how I wanted to “be” in the relationship. I know the rules are different for us, but I didn’t know how I wanted to “be” with those rules. Also, we were in a new relationship and I wasn’t ready to tell everyone I knew about us because I wanted to keep him to myself. After we had been together about a week, we went to an event I have come to recall as my “One Day in the Closet”. This was an event put on by our church and ironically, it was an informational event for congregants about the church becoming a “welcoming congregation”. Being a “welcoming congregation” is a Unitarian Universalist designation meaning the church is GLBT Friendly. The church has a series of information sessions and then votes to become “a welcoming congregation”. Mel and I go to this and pretend for the whole day that we aren’t together, that we aren’t a couple. We know most of the people there and we try to “act normally.” It is agony. I want to hold his hand, I want to sit next to him. I feel physically sick from the deception. The event goes from 9am-3pm and when the end finally comes, I realize that if I am going to be in a relationship with Mel, then I am not going to hide. I am going to have to be brave enough to come out of the closet and tell everyone I know that we are together. Even though I am sure I don’t want to be closeted, I am also sure that I want to be safe. I become acutely aware of the special attention we get if we hold hands in public. I learn to ask myself whether it is safe before I grab Mel’s hand. I look around–usually for conservative looking rednecks–before offering a kiss. I am a rebel, so I like the...
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Question: When you write, you always use “he” when you write about Mel. Shouldn’t you use “she” before Mel transitioned and “he” after? Anonymous Answer: First of all, thanks for asking. There was a moment in time when we actually changed pronouns. I designed this with Mel’s mother and it was for us, not for Mel. It felt so hokey to wake up one day and change pronouns but it was starting to be weird. We went on one very memorable camping trip where half of the people were calling Mel “she” and half were calling Mel “he.” I tried not to use any pronouns at all. It was weird. So, on Labor Day, Mel’s mom came for a visit and we took the plunge. We started the process to change pronouns. I have to say it was a messy business. For several years I worried I would slip up and say the wrong pronoun. Mel has always been incredibly gracious about this but I have felt like I would fail him with a wrong pronoun. But now, I don’t slip. He is firmly placed in the “male” category in my mind. Somehow, I can’t go back and call Mel “she.” For me now, Mel was never a “she.” He has always been the exact same person he is now. And I feel like we righted a wrong and I have no desire to go back to a “wrong” construct. So, when I talk about Mel, I might talk about before he transitioned but he never wanted to be “she” and now I never want to go back either. So in my stories, Mel will always be “he.” Melanie The Crucible Bookii is my story as it continues to unfold and how I see the world from my perch on the edge of the Crucible…because falling in love changed everything. To read more about our story, may I suggest Unlikely Renewal of...
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