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Posts Tagged "Unitarian Universalist"
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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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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Last night we went to an event at the kids’ school put on by the Baptists. It was a weird event– at the end of the day they put up a bunch of gigantic bouncy things and invited the kids to what they called a Community Event. Earlier in the week the school sent home an invitation. It was impossible to say no to the boys without telling them why. For me the “why” would have been something like–“Hey kids, we can’t go to that event because the Baptists actively campaign against our marriage and family in the two countries we are citizens of and they don’t support our family so we can’t go to their event and eat their hot-dogs because it is a trick.” That message seemed inappropriate for children, so I took them to the event. They had a couple of guys playing music who were super talented, some hamburgers and hot-dogs, and a bunch of games for the kids, manned by very attractive teenagers. Some other parents who we know from the school were also there. The kids had a fantastic time with their friends and everything was free. All in all, it was a great event for the kids. I ended up having a couple of weird conversations with two of the Baptists. One was taking part in a survey that I answered honestly. The girl doing the survey asked if I believed in heaven or hell and I said no. Then she asked what happens after I die, and I said I honestly didn’t know. She didn’t seem to like my answer and prodded “What do you think happens?” I thought about it for a moment and realized that I really don’t know, and said so (as I answered her I realized I am kind of okay with not knowing). I realized no one really knows. I could tell she was pretty uncomfortable with my answer. She asked if she could show me what the Bible says,...
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The next day I was looking in the mirror feeling disappointed in myself. I actually, really looked at my face in the mirror and I realized I didn’t want to be the person who was afraid to explore the world in any way I chose.
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