A Life Well Lived, Up To Now

Around the age of 14 I moved from the children's table to the adult table. All of a sudden I was listening to my older women talk about pregnancy, child birth, menstruation. Women topics. But most of the conversations were about house work, dinner, birthdays, school, love, and men. Women topics. There was never talk about how bad they had it, women's rights, pay gap, or any of the other worries that I would study in college. In fact when I was in college my home life didn't square up with the ideas I was studying, and when I brought it up I was reminded of home, love, and a woman's g*ft of making a home and family.

We were average middle class. No such thing as new cars, vacations, new clothes. Too many children, blue collar jobs. But I was in college, the first and only one to attend. And by then, I had fallen into another way of life, I was in love with my best friend, another girl. I knew it, no one needed to tell me. And I had done the impossible, I had kissed her, in a most unladylike manner.

Not something I would ever tell my mother.

After college I gravitated to San Francisco, well Oakland, a world where other girls like me lived. I jumped in and out of bed with girls I barely knew. I fell in and out of love. I got together with an older woman, who was more toxic than the worst toxic man I ever met. She hurt my soul, and threw me out on the curb. Broke, soul crushed, embarrassed, scared I crawled home, to the bosom of family, where women led normal lives.

There I met a man, older, well employed, a professional, my mother's boss. In a mater of weeks he had me in bed, he went through my virginity like a hot knife through butter. In no time at all he had me doing his laundry. My mother, my aunts, my older sisters all said that if I washed his underwear I better get married. And one year after leaving San Francisco I was married to a man 20 years older, not so much a wife, more like a daughter.

I did what women do all over the world, I got pregnant. On purpose, to start my family, to be a full adult, wife and mother. It was, since the day I joined the women in the kitchen, the happiest day of my life. Gone were the worries of who am I, gone were the worries of where will I live, gone were the worries of my future. I had arrived.

I went on and had three children, built my home, did my fair share of housework. My husband was a good provider, I drove a nice car, lived in a house with central heat and air conditioning. I did good as my mother said. But life also kicks you, I lost my husband to cancer. A widow at the age of 42, with three children in high school. One day my life was complete, one day I lost the most important man in my life.

Today, 8 years later I live with my partner, a woman doctor. My family still shake their head, it must be the trauma of losing my husband. That I matured, became a full woman in my own right, that my husband finished raising me in my twenties, that I became a wife and mother, does any of that count? It does, I don't regret a minute of my marriage to my husband, if anyone needed a strong hand then it was me.

But now I've come full circle, I'm a full fledged woman, a mother, a partner, a lesbian. Yes the L word I hid from my mother.