Somehow I am Here

I’ve been writing a lot of cover letters lately, going to a lot of interviews. I find myself writing over and over lines like “I have been working in LGBTQ+ organizing for 20 years” or somehow being able to say “I have worked in Unitarian Universalist congregations for the last decade.” There have been so many times in my life where it seemed impossible that I would figure out the next step. As a depressed teenager I couldn’t imagine life in my early twenties. When I started college I never thought I could finish. When I was 20 I never imagined being 30. A decade ago I didn’t think I’d ever get to be a parent.

Yesterday I arrived to pick up my preschooler from school. He was sitting on the rug with his preschool friends, looking at a book. I walked in and sat down next to him and, once he noticed me, he jumped up and said “Oh! DADDY! HI DADDY!” And then he grabbed my hand and pulled me to the hallway to get his stuff. We collected his still-tiny boots and I helped him put on his favorite pink fleece, making sure his shirt sleeves didn’t bunch up. I zipped it up and down, three times, before zipping it all the way up and booping his nose because I know it makes him laugh when I do that. We went to the car and I buckled him in, making sure to adjust the chest clip like I have thousands of times over the years. He didn’t want a snack.

We went to pick up my kindergartener, spending part of school vacation week back at her own beloved preschool, now as one of the “returning big kids.” We found her scattered mittens and snow clothes and lunchbox, and then she ran out the door and climbed in the car. She’s a big kid, she can buckle her own car seat now. I still always check, just to make sure, before supplying her with the requested snack lest she go without access to cheddar bunnies for any amount of time.

My oldest had spent the day at home with my coparent. She’s big and nine and independent. She came out the door looking every bit like a small teenager; floppy hat, unzipped coat, leggings. She finally transitioned to a booster seat last year and for some reason the seatbelt feels like such a big kid thing. I brushed her hair when she got to my place - it was a tangled mess and I’ll brush her hair every time she still lets me.

Somehow I’m here, living this life I never thought I’d have.

A friend shared something yesterday and one part stuck out to me, a small part of a much longer post, about having the community now, as an adult, that they could only have dreamt about as a teenager. Some days I don’t feel that far from that scared, lonely teenager and some days I get to look back and see all the life I have already lived.

The internet became a household thing for me when I was in middle school and it completely changed my life almost entirely for the better. If not for the people I met online my life would be immeasurably worse. Beyond those people I also learned about communities and events and what life looked like for others. People talk down about the internet a lot but it is how I learned about who I am and the life I wanted. Suddenly I could learn about queer culture and read interviews with authors of books that meant a lot to me and find people writing about bodily autonomy and feminism and sexuality and alternative historical perspectives. It changed who I am and how I think.

I had this habit of printing out articles and photocopying pages of books I wanted to read over and over and putting them in folders I brought to school to peruse during more boring lessons (didn’t learn much about calculus but basically committed information on the suffragists to memory). One of those was a subchapter from Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon titled “Sabbats and Esbats – How Covens Work.” I am not joking when I tell you I think I read that 50 times in high school. It just seemed so wild and exotic that people were actually doing these things; I was intrigued and I also had no idea how one would even begin to get into that kind of life that seemed so far from who and where I was.

I think about that a lot, reading those poorly photocopied pages about queers and witches and long distance hikers and political protesters and everything I wasn’t, all while I was supposed to be caring about the formulas to calculate the area of different kinds of triangles or slogging my way through The Heart of Darkness. I remember so vividly staring out the small, high up windows on those beige classroom walls and just wondering what a life with queers and feminists and song and spirit would look like. I was not popular in high school.

And, while it does involve significantly more planning meetings than I could ever have anticipated, I have that life I never thought I would, some of it at least. I have people that come together for song and ritual and community. I have so many people in my life who take gender roles and fold them into little rainbow origami flowers, people who have told both the patriarchy and the police to fuck right off, people who march in the streets for justice, people like those people I never thought I would meet much less be one of.

Life is hard right now; I started blogging again to keep myself from doomscrolling because almost every one of my beloved community members is being targeted for some aspect of their identity by our current administration. Eight years ago, when we were living through part 1 of this I remember holding my then-toddler daughter, crying and singing protest songs to her. We promised her we’d protect her and keep her safe. It seems impossible that was eight years ago and that barely-speaking, pudgy faced baby is the same big kid that helped me make dinner last night while chatting about her plans for the spring and summer and what she’s reading lately and how excited she is about the school musical.

Somehow, however unlikely, I’m one of those adults I never thought I would be. Both more mundane and more radical than I thought possible of myself.