Reading: Blair's Nightmare

Moving: Biked to work

Learning: oh! so many things.

Watching: not the Columbine "training video."

27 April 2000: My my my

Hey, Ma! If you ever find and read this page, do so at your own risk. A lot of this site might piss you off, but almost all of it is mine and I embrace whatever umbrage you take. This is someone else's, hence the onceler warning.

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A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, gossip happened. I am going to assign generic, three-letter names, which is fitting for my three-initial abbreviation convention and because the main players have three-letter nicknames in RL anyway.

Ann and Joe had been going out for three years. Happily, then long-distance, then cheating, and together again, but still, three years. Suddenly (from Joe's perspective), Ann broke up with Joe to be with Bob, who was news to Joe. Ann told her bf Kit everything, and that she and Bob would be married in six months. Kit promptly told me. I called Joe to offer my shoulder and condolences, and we talked.

During the conversation I expressed my shock that Ann and Bob had got engaged before Ann even bothered to break up with Joe.

That was the first Joe had heard of that. He knew he'd been broken up with, but he didn't know she was already engaged with a date set six months off. Being the master of self-control that he is, he didn't let on that that was news to him, and the conversation went along.

Of course, I felt hideously guilty for breaking the news to him in such a manner (when indeed I did find out what I had inadvertently done, some days later), but I never thought anything of it at the time: why would I? Of course Ann wouldn't tell Kit anything she hadn't told Joe. Well, actually, she would: apparently she wanted to break it to him gradually, as if none of their mutual friends--Kit, me, or others, all of whom were fully informed--might talk to him before she took the next step, whenever she planned to do that (several days had elapsed between her break-up and my call).

Of course, when Joe asked her, "Say, did you omit any pertinent fact when you broke up with me?" she was furious with me for telling him, as if I'd done it on purpose, but that's another tangent.

My point is that I had that conversation with my sister today.

I haven't talked to CLH for weeks and weeks. Today she had off, and in the midst of doing bills and cleaning and watching GH--hey, she's watching GH and not the surely inferior Guiding Light--she called me at work.

Except I was at lunch, so she got my voicemail. I speak my greeting in my Quiet Voice™ and of course she mocked that in her message and of course that always makes me laugh and I couldn't wait till I was home, on my own time, to talk to her. I can type and talk at the same time, and that's what I did.

Naturally we discussed our parents. She described BJWL's latest visit--details later--and in the course of converzatione, also said, "Of course, the last time Dad was here, I made him admit that he cheated on Mom, and then etc."
Meanwhile, back at the ranch here in Denver, I was processing that. Unlike "Joe," I am not quite the strong silent type. As soon as I gathered breath, I said,
"What?"
Now on some completely different topic, CLH repeated whatever she'd just said.
"No no no, not that. I heard that. It's what you said before. What? When? After the divorce, when they were living together?"
"You didn't know? No, before that. Didn't you ever wonder?"
"Of course I wondered, but I never knew. Before 1980? Before they divorced? Who? When?"
"He didn't say who or when, but yes, before they divorced, when we were all living in the same house, and I assume more than once, because he said 'it was never who or when she thought.' So she suspected it."

I knew Sheryl came along before he moved out of the house for the final time, in spring of 1992. It's why I consider his resentful "I was just about to ask your mother out to a movie" reaction to the arrival of the Dittohead a full year after that, in spring of 1993, to be so amusingly ironic. Sheryl I can deal with: by the '90s, my parents' relationship, such as it was, was over over over and they merely lacked the forthright to do anything definitive and sensible like, oh, live in separate houses. I am pretty sure, although I maybe don't want to know for certain, that Sheryl's "We've been together since forever" means "since no earlier than 1991."

So finding out that he was adulterous before they divorced--and, N.B., their divorce happened more than ten years before their relationship ended--doesn't really change my perception of him. I'm not going to sever relations with him because of something that happened over 20 years ago that's got fuck-all to do with me. Except it has got to do with me, and it's a paradigm shift.

Another reason I've blocked any notion of my parents' cheating on each other (or "just" him on her) is that I do not conceive (<---) of my parents as sexual beings. At all. Ever. After I became sexually active, I began to realize how much sexual starvation contributed to my mother's permanent grouchiness, but that's a consideration I could not begin to fathom when I was victim to her frustration.

But of course it was possible. My sister and I wouldn't be the heartstoppingly gorgeous creatures we are if our parents were dogs.

OH! I just realized this: at some point when I was in college my father--had to be college for me to be speaking to him again, pro'ly late college--and I were talking about drugs. He said he'd been to parties where there were lines of coke on coffee tables like cocktail peanuts or olives. At the time, I wondered how the fuck my father ever associated with that kind of crowd but figured it had happened in the early '80s in the aftermath of the divorce. At the time, I also wondered why the fuck he was telling me, his sanctimonious offspring, but until I was 12 and stopping speaking to him, we had good conversations. I remember long walks in the woods with my father and Sagi or Shadow, talking about everything. So maybe he confessed that to bridge the chasm I'd begun to dig as soon as the divorce was announced.

But if my father could be in the presence of coke (do I want to contemplate whether he indulged in the coke?), he could have had affairs. Somehow it counts as independent verification to me.

"I don't know why you girls think you have self-esteem problems."

Our father.

CLH now sits contentedly, if not firmly, in the no-breeding camp, which is much better company for me than her dismay at my choice of a few years ago. She told me, not for the first time, that she and Dad have discussed grandchildren and that he realizes he'll probably never be a grandfather, and we discussed our discretely arrived at but parallel conclusions that we would never allow our parents to be alone with our children. Particularly with our mother, who wounds people's psyches so skillfully, without even trying.
"Dad not so much, though," CLH conceded.
"Yeah, but he's prejudiced. Way prejudiced."
CLH said that she would have told him that if he had something hateful to say, he could not do it in earshot of her child. See, that's why I love CLH. I could never say something like that, rational and reasonable, to my parents. My pattern is much more to let resentment build and then boil over. So productive and healthy
"But I'd never fear for the kid's physical safety with them," she continued. No, neither would I.

There's no denying that my relationship with her and my dread of what she would do to my child were factors in my decision not to reproduce--though not as major a factor as my dread of what I what do to my child. Patterns.

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In happier news, I'm a pea! There's almost no one I'd rather share a pod with than Jessie. Thanks, Jenn.

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I added pictures to the Saturday's entry about egg-dyeing, plus here's a picture of part of my ride home from work.

Although Blake is right now clambering among the pens in my pencil box, gnawing the box and plotting how he can jump up to top of the speaker and thence to the bookcase, where lie shells and stone he can hurl to the floor, he has his quiet moments too.

From a few days ago, this is about the cutest thing in the world. He has pressed his breast against my leg, lifted a foot, and--this is the best--tucked his beak into his wing. Obviously. Isn't it precious? Such a demonstration of trust. Which I violated with a flash. He'd already opened that left eye partway when he heard the camera open--not because it was a camera but because it was an unexpected noise.