Will you gay marry me?

About two weeks ago, my childhood friend Laura Grubl Gillette died of Myelodysplastic Syndrome, a bone marrow disease that had no business taking the life of my sassy middle school friend. Laura was 27. She met her husband in college and married him about three years before she died. The chances of something like this happening to me or my partner is slim -- just as slim as it was for Laura.

Trying not to be alarmist, I told my partner that I think it's time for us to at least be each other's medical power of attorney. We don't want to have a wedding at this point in our lives, but Laura's diagnosis and death are a wake-up call to me that I shouldn't procrastinate on being proactive. E and I are each much closer to our mothers than to our fathers, and our mothers are in full support of our relationship, whether legally recognized or not. If something happened to E, I have no doubt that his mother would treat me as his partner. If something happened to me, I'm only about 75% sure my mom would treat E as my partner, and that's only if they agree on everything. Our fathers would be wildcards.

I am generally opposed to the notion of legal marriage. Given the option, I'd rather replicate the legal rights and responsibilities of marriage without actually having a legal marriage. (I talk more about that here.) When I casually broached the subject of medical decisions with my mother, she indicated that she wouldn't treat E as my "husband" unless he was, because the lack of marriage (or at least a symbolic wedding?) indicates that he does not hold that place in my life. That, of course, is the wrong conclusion to draw from our lack of legal or symbolic marriage. (Not to mention that with or without marriage of any sort, we have no intention of being "husband" and "wife.")

I started looking at Lambda Legal's toolkit for dealing with exactly this issue. I was hoping for some easy-to-fill-out forms, but found that it's not that easy. So I looked up a lawyer I know who is himself in a marriage not legally recognized by the state, and who deals with estate planning and related issues. After some searching, I determined that replicating just one or two of the things that automatically come with marriage would cost at least $500. We're both employed, and while we don't have much left over at the end of the month, we could find a way to manage that. But then I looked up what it takes to get a marriage license in our county. Fill out a form, pay $67, then have a civil ceremony in the magistrate court. (It could be $27, but I don't think we want to go through state-approved premarital counseling.) To be fair, I can't find any information on what a civil ceremony requires or if there are costs involved, but for now I'm assuming it's free. I can get a no-contest divorce in the state of Georgia for about $300.

When I told my partner this on the phone today, he got the sudden urge to donate to a mainstream gay organization that deals with marriage equality. I could pay somewhere around $500 for a document that may or may not get me into my partner's hospital room, or I could pay $367 for an ironclad assurance of that and many other things AND dissolve it whenever I wanted to.

This is what marriage inequality is about. And this is what happens when relationships are valued based on the state's interests instead of the people's interests.

9/11

I am full of mixed feelings about the 10th anniversary of 9/11. The three major feelings are

• sadness, much like what I assume the rest of the country is feeling, for the loss of life in 2001
• confused nostalgia, for what it was like to be an American before 9/11, which is also the last year before I was in college, and the two life-changing events are inextricable
• anger, for the ways the U.S. exploited other countries and cultures before 9/11, and the ways we stepped exploitation and war up afterwards, and the ways we've treated Americans and nonAmericans, particularly those with brown skin

Sadness

I remember every detail of September 11, 2001. I remember walking into 3rd period AP English, where I think we had a sub. I remember Kim Clay walking in and saying a plane flew into the World Trade Center, and no one knew if it was an accident. I remember hoping that it was. I remember turning on the TV moments after the second plane hit, and watching with my classmates at both towers fell. I remember spending lunchtime in the theater classroom, and learning from a friend that her older brother who I adored had just joined the Army a few weeks earlier. I remember being in 5th period statistics and having the principal call all classrooms to say we should turn the TVs off because it was creating fear and distraction. I remember we didn't comply, though we turned the volume down and did try to leave it off for a few minutes. I remember wondering if my dad was safe and sound where he worked in Elizabeth, NJ, or if he had taken his class on a field trip. I remember my mom signing me out of school and telling me my cousin Dana had just moved to NYC a few weeks earlier, but that all of my family in NJ was ok. I remember being glued to the TV, mostly to Fox News, for the next months. I remember being angry at my brother for saying we should just "wipe 'them' off the face of the earth."

Confused nostalgia

I move to Florida from New Jersey when I was 10. Every time I visited NJ after that, it seemed old-fashioned. Indeed, the area I lived in was new, mostly built within the preceding five to ten years, but it had a different culture. Florida didn't have pinball machines in family-owned pizza joints. It wasn't that Florida outgrew it, it's just that those things never existed. Anything NJ had that FL didn't seemed outdated to me because my whole world and the context in which I understood the present shifted, particularly because I was young enough to remember feelings and general impressions more than specifics.

I feel similarly about 9/11. My entire life would have changed that year anyway. I went to college in August 2002; 9/11 was the beginning of my senior year of high school. I turned 18 in 2002. Without 9/11, I surely would have become more politically aware and active right around the same time. I would have noticed the PATRIOT Act, and the war in Afghanistan, followed by the war in Iraq and everything that came after. I would have still been part of peace demonstrations in March 2003 after learning at a Bible study that the U.S. bombed Iraq. And yet, I cannot separate 9/11 and the culture of fear and xenophobia that came after from the natural change in me as I grew up.

Anger

This one is difficult to write about. I will be brief because I don't want to pretend that I know more about history than I really do. I know that for more than a century, my country has been at the forefront of encouraging violence around the world. We train, build, design, create the most lethal armies and weapons the world has ever seen. We remain, and hopefully will continue to remain, the only country that has used a nuclear weapon and wrought such thorough destruction of lives past, present, and future. This is the culture in which we live. How, then, could we expect to be exempt from violence ourselves? And after we are the victims, after we see first-hand what violence does to our own country, how can we believe that the way away from violence is to perpetrate more of it? Or that the way to unity is through exclusion, exploitation, marginalization, mass murder, kidnapping, xenophobia, and betrayal of our neighbors?

This thought makes me feel patriotic. The belief that fellow Americans -- citizens or not, 'legal' or not -- deserve to be treated as full human beings. I also believe that it is patriotic to say that this applies to all people. My trust in humanity, in individuals' need and desire to protect themselves and their families and their lives, extends far beyond America's borders. This is not a uniquely American characteristic. The culture of fear and violence that has been perpetrated by my country on itself and on the world has been a uniquely American venture, and it makes me feel sad, angry, and betrayed. My country is the people who ran into the wreckage of the World Trade Centers, the Pentagon, and the crash in Pennsylvania, not the people who fight fire with fire.

There is a quote from The West Wing that stirs my heart no matter how many times I see it. In the scene, the president is giving a preplanned speech shortly after a pipe bomb attack killed dozens of people at a university. He says this:

"...More than any time in recent history, America's destiny is not of our own choosing. We did not seek nor did we provoke an assault on our freedoms and our way of life. We did not expect nor did we invite a confrontation with evil. Yet the true measure of a people's strength is how they rise to master that moment when it does arrive. Forty-four people were killed a couple hours ago at Kennison State University; three swimmers from the men's team were killed and two others are in critical condition; when after having heard the explosion from their practice facility they ran into the fire to help get people out... ran into the fire. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight. They're our students and our teachers and our parents and our friends. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels, but every time we think we have measured our capacity to meet a challenge, we look up and we're reminded that that capacity may well be limitless. This is a time for American heroes. We will do what is hard. We will achieve what is great. This is a time for American heroes and we reach for the stars. God bless their memory, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America."

Naming

In my hunt for things to include in a Feminism 101, came across a blogpost on reproductive rights. It's meant to be a wrapup of the CLPP Reproductive Justice Conference, but it includes great quotes from incredible people, Loretta Ross being a personal favorite. Part of the description caught me off-guard, though. I checked the date, and this was from April 2011.

Discussing gender, Ross said that she didn’t like the term cisgender (when a person’s gender identity matches their biological sex) as it was too medical.  She also said that she didn’t appreciate that it was a term bestowed on her rather than one she chose for herself.  I completely understand what she’s saying.  Naming is so integral to power and identity.  Another panelist said that the term was created so as not to say “non-transgender” as it’s offensive to refer to people by what they are not.  Issues of privilege and gender arose amongst the panel.  An audience member said that she was a trans woman and that she found being transgender to be a privilege (I was intrigued!).  She went on to say that while people can oppress you for it, it’s also a privilege to be able to choose your gender.  Since many reproductive justice activists discuss the power of choice, I love that idea of the power of choosing your gender.

First, let me say that the pronouns toward the end are confusing and potentially misleading. Is the trans woman in the audience saying you get to choose your gender? Or Loretta Ross? Or another panelist? I'm not sure. But more to the point, I've heard this discomfort with "cisgender" (and "cissexual") expressed elsewhere, and I've finally put my finger on why it irks me.


I don't like being called white. I'm Italian, I'm third generation, and my immigrant grandparents weren't welcomed into the fold of white people upon their arrival at Ellis Island. But it doesn't matter. I benefit from white privilege and white supremacy every day, in every part of my life, and so do my ancestors. Sure, I'd rather get to choose a different word, but at the end of the day, I think privileged folks get to take a backseat in defining our privilege.


Intersectionality tells me that there will be parts of my life where I have privilege and parts where I do not. I think it's important to recognize that privilege and oppression are intertwined and incalculable, and I'm not into Oppression Olympics. My race privilege doesn't undo my gender oppression; my class privilege doesn't undo sizist oppression. These are all forces that act upon me and my life, and that influence my real and perceived relationships and interactions with other people. My gender identity and expression are fluid and complex, and most of the time I'm too tired to deal with them -- and that's a privilege. Generally I'm comfortable identifying and being recognized as a woman. I don't believe I've ever been misgendered in public (or in private, for that matter), and since being misgendered would likely lead to embarrassment on the other person's part rather than danger on mine, I don't particularly care. I'm not transsexual. I was assigned female at birth, and I find that to be a mostly accurate assignation. I recognize that at some point in the future that may change for me, but my present truth is that I'm cissexual. Just like any time we try to make a clear distinction between two things, there are people who fall in the middle or outside the system entirely. I tend to straddle the line between cisgender and transgender.


Cis might not be my favorite prefix, but I appreciate and agree with the reason it's used: defining people as cisgender and transgender replaces definitions that are problematic to trans folks. For example: normal/trans, natural/created, healthy/disordered, born/chosen (or born/transitioned)  Cis and trans are prefixes that, on their own, do not carry value judgments the way the above do. So I claim cis for the same reason I claim white, middle-class, and able-bodied. Nuance is important, but when we're talking about systems of race, class, and disability oppression, I need to take a backseat.

What Borders' Closing Means to Local Bookstores

Whenever something with cultural importance happens, I always look for the third (or more) way of looking at it. When the BP oil spill happened last year, I was as uncomfortable with the "boycott BP" opinion as I was with the "who cares, don't boycott" opinion. Instead I preferred looking at it in terms of whether local branches are really locally owned, how much of their oil is required to be from BP, etc. So when I got this email from my favorite independent bookstore, I thought it needed to be shared.

You may have heard that Borders is officially closing all of its remaining stores and liquidating all of its assets. Many of you in the community have asked what this means for Charis and if we are happy about it. The truth is that while losing a competitor is generally a good thing, Borders' closing is bad for the book industry on the whole and especially sad for the thousands of fellow booksellers who have lost their jobs. We mourn the loss of any place where people go to talk about and celebrate books. Richard Nash, former head of Soft Skull Press, expressed what many of us at Charis think in a recent CNN article: "We have more culture, more media, than we can now consume in a thousand lifetimes -- we don't need any more choice. What we need is help in choosing. Borders was not offering that. The reality is that the logistics of selling books to America's readers doesn't require a few thousand superstores with 40,000 titles in each. So the book retail sector has to shrink and will continue to shrink, whether it was more independent stores, or some chains closing, or other chains shrinking. But it need not vanish. Sixty-four million Americans read five hours a week or more, 16 million Americans report they have engaged in creative writing, and more than 2 million titles went on sale in the U.S. last year. With all that supply and demand, we need matchmakers, people with expertise, knowledge, and intuition to connect people with books, to offer help in choosing what to read. Bookstores can and should be sites for this conversation. Increasingly, the good ones are places where people seeking deeper engagement with their culture and society choose to congregate."

We sincerely hope that Charis can be a place that encourages your deeper engagement with the world. That is why we are here. We believe in the power of books, of ideas, of fellowship through conversation and debate. We need your voice in the room but we also need you to continue to buy your books (both digital and print) from us. We want you to help us shape the future of feminist literary community in Atlanta by offering your ideas, your time, and your resources to build the Charis Center and to continue to support Charis Books and Charis Circle.

We are so grateful to still be here and hear so many of you say that we are more vital to your lives than ever before. When people ask us "how we do it" we always say that we have the most loyal customers in the world. We are still here for and because of you. Thank you!

Easiest, tastiest pasta recipe ever

This recipe won me two boys' hearts in a single day. I use "recipe" loosely, as it's barely complex enough to earn the title. It's much like a simple scampi sauce, but a bit lighter.

4-6 cloves garlic, depending on preference
1/4 c extra virgin olive oil
1 tbs lemon juice
1/2 lb spaghetti
1/2 - 1 c freshly grated parmesan cheese

Put water on to boil the spaghetti. The rest of the process will be done before the spaghetti is cooked. Peel the garlic and cut each clove into halves or quarters. You want the garlic to brown, so don't crush it or cut it too small. Put the oil in a pan and put the garlic in the oil. Heat on medium-high until the garlic has a brown outline and looks generally roasted. Remove from heat and quickly add the lemon juice, stirring to mix thoroughly. When the pasta is done, drain it and put it back in the pot or a big bowl so you can toss it with the oil mixture. Serve with copious amounts of parmesan. Eat it before the cheese starts to melt, and your mouth will love you.

Serves 2-3

A new sexual manifesto

I grew up believing that my body belonged to God, to my future husband, to anyone other than myself. I was told and thoroughly believed that sex would ruin me, would make me less worthy, would change me in an inconceivable way so that I could never form healthy, strong relationships with anyone else. I was told that having sex was like super-gluing two pieces of wood together. You could pull them apart if you tried hard enough, but there would be slivers of each piece of wood stuck to the other forever. I believed sex was a thing I gave away or could be taken from me.

When I fuck who I want to, how I want to, and when I want to, that is a radical victory for love. When I can do that with someone I respect as a whole, autonomous person, that is a radical victory for love. When I can do that without sacrificing my healthy, committed relationship, that is a radical victory for love.

Activist Exhaustion

In the summer of 2004, I interviewed Mandy Carter for the now-defunct Southern Voice (which has pretty much been replaced by the Georgia Voice, same staff, new management). That summer was full of 'aha!' moments, which I told her about in 2006 when I picked her up from the airport for a speaking engagement. In that first interview, she talked about learning to use her privilege to do meaningful activist work. I had to try not to splutter in disbelief when I asked her what kind of privilege she had as a black lesbian in the South. In response, she gave the example of immigrant rights issues. As a U.S.-born citizen, she could march, speak, argue, and push for immigrants' rights without fear of deportation or prosecution of herself or her family.

Though it's embarrassing to admit, that was the first time I'd ever thought about immigrant rights. It was after the first introduction of the DREAM Act but before it would become a major policy priority, and before the assault on immigrants would make Arizona's SB 1070, Georgia's HB 87, and similar state legislation part of the national conversation. In the run-up to Georgia's passage of HB 87 and now in its aftermath, I have done nothing to fight it. I've barely even spoken about it. Every time I hear of my friends doing strategy meetings or going to protests, the first thing I feel is tired (and the second is relief that someone else has the energy for it).

It's been nearly two years since I felt like I did any real activism. I do some work here and there, mostly in the arenas of sexual orientation and gender, and mostly at or with my alma mater. I like that work, and my job has become my major center of activism. I get to do a lot of strategic planning that works towards sustainable, empowering services for low-income senior citizens in Atlanta, but my work isn't actually organizing. It's policy in a way because I get to decide what sort of programming we propose to do with public funding (and we're a major supplier of publicly funded senior services in the area), but it's very peripheral, very intra-system, and mostly single-issue focused.

I live my personal life in a way that feels radical to me, building and maintaining relationships in ways that don't fit the misogynist, heterosexist ways I was trained to. I love fully and in ways that make me vulnerable; polyamory has become a greater part of how I live my life. I have a DIY ethic and I'm learning and doing more every day. But those things are the outcomes of activism; they aren't activism itself. I don't quite know how to get back to activism; I don't quite know what I'm looking for. Sometimes I think school is the answer, or part of it, but I doubt it will be the answer if I'm doing school part time while working full time. And still, every time I think about what it might look like, all I can picture is a tiny drop in a huge bucket and an overwhelming sense of fatigue.

The stages of breaking up

I don't talk much about my feelings here, except as they relate to my life being awesome or my politics being angry. The last few months, though, have been a new sort of experience for me in my relationship to my fantastic partner and my relationship to my own sexuality, my mental health, and my heart. Much of my life is a political statement and/or a string of rebellious acts against a culture that requires me to be shut in, shut up, and invisible.

So here's how this went.

I decided I wanted to find a casual relationship or two, and I got lucky. I let myself fall for M, the new guy in my life, though I knew from the beginning that he wouldn't be able to do anything more than a very very casual relationship. It ended after about a month and a half, after a lot of fun and a lot of love. I decided that I connected with him in a way that made me want to stay in each other's lives, though I have an irrational discomfort with the idea of him dating other women. This is the shortest relationship I've ever had with someone I love -- beginning in high school, I've had multi-year relationships nearly back-to-back -- so I was surprised to find myself going through the stages of grief that usually apply to breaking up, albeit not in order. I was also surprised (though I shouldn't have been) to find that my partner and my best friend, who is an ex-boyfriend, were standing by with open arms and warm reassurances

This is all very weird, in that it's not weird at all. When I started thinking about being polyamorous, I read The Ethical Slut, which is pretty much the bible of poly. I had issues with it then, and I still do, but everyone reads it because it's the only thing to be read. I remember thinking it must feel so different to be poly, to have multiple relationships, to negotiate that space, to lose a nonprimary relationship. But it doesn't. It feels the same. Sort of. And I think there needs to be some place that says that. So here goes.


Stage 1: Denial/isolation
Only in processing later did I realize that I went through this stage first and third. Through the whole six or so weeks that M and I were dating/fucking/doing our thing, I let the knowledge that it was finite fade from my mind. I didn't take that into account when deciding how much to invest in the relationship. When I met him, I had been talking to a few other people about potential casual relationships, and I let those go. It recognized that there are only 24 hours in a day, but it also meant that I put all my eggs in one basket, thus isolating myself a bit.

Stage 2: Bargaining
This was my second step, though it's usually the third of five when talking about grief. It's supposed to refer to bargaining with God, the universe, or something intangible. I found myself bargaining with M, stopping only barely short of losing my dignity. I knew that he saw our relationship as one between friends who share activities, and one of those activities was sex. I saw him as a sort of boyfriend, someone that I talked to a lot, who could provide emotional support, and to whom I felt intimately connected.

My first way of bargaining was to separate out the three aspects of our relationship: talking/hanging out, nonsexual intimacy like snuggling, and fucking. I hoped maybe he could do two of the three, being either fuckbuddies or cuddley friends. Those weren't options for him anymore. Next was pointing out that our last date had ended kind of dramatically (with a condom break and running around at 2 a.m. finding EC), and I hated that that would be the end of it. Or hey, maybe we could just pick a date to stop fucking, especially since we'd both be starting school soon (him in July, me in August). As expected, none of these things worked. He knew what he needed, and I knew it was coming.

Stage 3: Denial/depression
Here I went back to denial, mixed with depression. I knew that I would especially miss our habit of setting specific dates and times for specific activities. As the relationship went on, it had become less structured, but since having a date required scheduling when my partner would be out of the house, we had a weekly standing-but-flexible date for hanging out, fucking, and watching Firefly. We decided to still have dedicated friendates that would involve non-sex activities. The first one was really hard for me. It felt like an evening of constant rejection because I had still hoped it could be something other than it was. I'm still dealing with this a little bit, but now instead of denying that it's over, I'm denying that he's interested in someone else. (He is. He told me. I've asked him not to, but you can't always hide something that's on your mind constantly.)

The night that I consider the actual breakupI put up a new craigslist ad looking for a replacement. Before I met M, I had no idea that it would be something I didn't feel so casual about. I couldn't tell that from his emails or texts. But as I started talking to other guys, all I could think was "This isn't M. He doesn't look like him, he won't smell like him, he doesn't feel like him, this isn't going to be what I want." The depression stage is one I expect to be in a bit longer.

Stage 4: Anger
Anger is a little strange for me. I knew I needed to get angry, but I had no reason to be angry with M. He didn't do anything wrong. Even when I'd asked him not to tell me about other people he was flirting with and it slipped out anyway, I couldn't get mad at him for that. It's not his job to take care of my feelings and reactions; it's mine. He's started fading away a little bit. He's not responding to my messages as often as he had been, and it's difficult to get him to answer even direct questions about specific plans. I'm pretty sure it's because he's flirting with someone else, and he can get very one-track-minded. I think that's where the anger will come from. I knew that we had different interpretations of our relationship from the get-go, but we agreed on our expectations of friendship and this isn't it. Now the struggle is to nurture healthy anger while maintaining a friendship.

What did make me angry was feeling like I had no agency in the situation. I felt like I didn't have a choice, like M decided when what would happen. We broke up when he was too close to falling, not when I was ready. It took almost two weeks (I'm now at 2 weeks, 2 days) to realize that I had a choice, and I made a choice.

M is ready to have a relationship, and for a while it was ok to be casual with me, knowing that I had a serious committed relationship as well. I don't know that a committed serious relationship between us would work, but he said he thought it could, given a different situation. It makes my heart happy to know that despite the fact that he had multi-year serious relationships, I'm the person he connected with the best. If I was available for it, he would be happy being in a more serious relationship with me.

Stage 5: Acceptance/agency
I talk about my life in terms of choice a lot. It's important to me that I choose to be with my partner every day. It's not a difficult choice to make -- he's amazing, we're great together, it's what I want for my life. But still, it's a choice. When M and I were saying goodbye after the breakup finally sank in for me, we were in my bedroom, in the house I share with my partner. As he was hugging me, he looked around. When I asked what he was thinking, he said my life is all set up. I have a partner and a house and pets and a job and impending graduate school and a life. That's something he wants in his life, but he's in the middle of a big transition, and he's not there yet.

I could have chosen to walk away from that, or more accurately to disentangle myself from that. I know it is an option to choose to be with someone else (or no one at all), to build a different life, or at least to destroy the life I've built. Just like it's an option to quit my job, hop a plane to Peru, and live in a tent in the mountains. These things are all possible and sometimes they sound like fun, but they aren't the life I want. The life I want is the one I've got, with the partner who's just right. This was a scary thing to admit to my partner, that I know I have the choice to leave. He has the same choice, and that scares me beyond belief. But I choose to trust him, and I choose to be trustworthy.

And so this is my choice. I choose to be happy, and I choose to believe that I can and will heal and grow. I will let my relationship with M become whatever it will be, and I will take space when I need it. I will find other people to be in my life as friends, lovers, or partners. I will fill my life up with love. Lucky for me, I'm very good at that.

Lies I learned growing up in the suburbs

• Food comes from the grocery store. Vegetables come from cans or the freezer.
• No distance is too short to drive.
• All songs are love songs.
• Art is about being cultured, not about expression. It is done by Artists, not by the rest of us.
• Three meals a day. No more, no less.
• A meal is one meat, one starch, and one vegetable.
• Grocery shopping happens once per week, generally on the same day each week.

Assholes & Anchors

It starts here, with this email from a friend:

My best friend's father, a man who I have basically anchored my faith in humanity to and have looked up to as a second father for years grabbed his shit and abandoned his family a few weeks ago, and did so by all appearances to be with another woman. I just found out.

 In responding to him later, I found myself writing about something I've been trying to avoid thinking about for a while. So here's that.

I know this is really throwing you. It's hard when the very few people you let yourself trust are the ones who fuck up in monumental ways. When I was talking about realizing that parents are just humans, I'm sure it sounded like I was brushing this off, so I want to tell you about when I had that realization with my dad.

My brother got married in 2005, which was a few months after I came out to my family and a week before I met my first partner (who's now my best friend). My dad and I hadn't really been connecting (it would be three years before he told me what a ridiculous reaction he was having to my coming out), but he'd always been the laissez-faire, be-my-kids'-best-friend kind of dad. He'd left my mom when I was 6 and my brother was 8, so he did the buying-our-love thing and it worked pretty well.

I drove to Florida for the wedding and spent time hanging out with my dad and brother while they test drove my first car, which I'd just bought. It was a really nice time, and I felt closer to them than I had since my mom moved me and my brother to Florida 11 years earlier. The three of us went to dinner with my brother's then-fiance, and we started talking about the wedding and how things would go, and how my brother had to negotiate the fact that we're close to both of our parents but not at all to our stepparents, but neither of our parents would've wanted to be introduced as if they were a couple. Out of nowhere, my dad says that if he had to walk in with my mom, he would much rather shoot her in the face. Much as I react to your gun violence-related jokes, I told him that wasn't funny. He told me he wasn't joking. I kept trying to get him to understand that that's my mother he was talking about and that was really fucked up to say about anyone, but it was my mother and the mother of his children. He didn't care. He truly meant, 100%, that he would like to shoot my mother in the face. I'm not one for huffing away, but I left the table. Thankfully I'd driven myself, but I couldn't go back to my mom's house to deal with that kind of awfulness.

I ended up pulling into a parking lot nearby and calling T, who talked me through understanding that parents are humans. No matter how much we valorize them, they are humans, and they have the same ability to be awful, confused, scared, or childish as any other person on earth. T said he had that realization about his parents around the same time most people do -- when he was a preteen. It took me a decade longer.

Since the asshole in question in your life isn't the father you grew up with, it's even harder. You didn't have childlike awe of him -- you had young adult-like awe, which feels like it should be far more reality-based. In general, I have a hard time balancing the idea of following my bliss and the idea of honoring commitments. It sounds like this dude had the same struggle, and he eventually came down on the side that makes you wonder what the point of building relationships and honoring commitments is at all. You can't decide he's a Bad Person because that means you were duped for years. You can't decide he just made a bad decision, or even made a decision that's good for his life, because we don't like to think of ourselves as people who can hurt our loved ones so deeply, especially in the service of our own happiness.

I don't have anything smart to tell you because there's nothing smart to do. It sucks. There is nothing that you can do to make it hurt less for yourself or the people you care about, and nothing you can do to un-make his assholic decision. This is going to hurt for a while. But hurt fades, and when it does, you'll find that you're still an introspective guy who can think about how this shook your world and how you can get a hold on it again. You'll get there. I don't know you well yet, but I know that you learn from everything that happens to you.

Take care of yourself. I'll be here for you when you need me.