I just realized that before I can move on, I have to excavate more of my core story – to bring some pieces together from my thoughts on my family, the women in my family, specifically my great-grandmother, and the connection between her experience and mine.
“Mary, my great-grandmother, was shunned so completely when she left the Amish church at age 17, that she never saw her family again.”
As I wrote that sentence earlier this week, I was physically struck, shocked even, by the knowledge that I realized I knew EXACTLY how she felt. I’ve been thoroughly shunned not once, but twice in my life, as a result of following my heart and my truth where it led me. It’s not enough to be unafraid to follow the call, it’s just as important to be unaffected by how the world perceives my actions. I would be infinitely more enlightened if I could ignore the response I got from people as I followed the call. And yet, the pain from being “set apart” from my community is still very real for me and I keep coming back to the wound.
Not enlightened, yet - obviously!
It’s possible the re-telling will help – what could it hurt?
Starting a new job about a year ago, I kept myself apart from my new co-workers. I told myself it was a result of my age, my experience, my difference in position from all the other women in the office, or even the fact that I worked in one state and lived in another. After all, why invest myself in a new community if I wasn’t there on the weekends, right?
But, at some point, it became too much to hold, my apartness, I was tentatively making new friends - I finally told my story to one person, then another and then, a few days after Christmas, I told a gaggle of women all at once.
It goes like this: “I’ve been married three times, first to a man for 17 years, then to a woman for 12 years, and now to a man again.”
This one, John, is the love I’ve looked for all my life, probably for many lifetimes. He’s key. But if I’m completely honest with myself, I feel “lucky in love”, always, not just this time. My choice in partners has not looked “lucky in love” to anyone else, however, and therein lies the problem. Damn convention!
When I left my first husband, Ron, it was amidst a storm of gossip and disbelief in a very small “forward thinking” mountain community. If not reasonable, or right, it was expected that there would be a stir when I left him for a woman. I was shunned, almost completely. This I learned to live with, all of our kids learned to live with it, and eventually, we reached a point where we felt, if not “normal”, at least comfortable and accepted. It’s hard work, teaching an entire community that people are just people, that who we love doesn’t really matter in the big picture.
What was unexpected was the response I got from that same community twelve years later when I left my partner, Linda, and married a man again. At that point in our life together, Linda and I had become “important” members of the community and I was unprepared for the utter and complete disconnect I experienced. I don’t fault anyone – my struggle is an internal one. Some people can understood what they perceive as a woman becoming her true self and being “lesbian”, but very few can wrap their heads around a switch “back”. Don’t even try to explain that, for me, there’s no such thing as being “lesbian” or “going back” – I am what I am. No label fits.
It feels almost self indulgent to wallow in this part of my core story – especially after reading so many powerfully sad or beautiful, and amazing life stories from other women.
But, for me, this is it. Despite living every day with the courage to make difficult, life changing, ambiguous choices and decisions, I also live every day with the insecurity of how others will perceive me.
And when I imagine the shunning my great-grandmother received, it brings up powerful feelings of empathy – I know EXACTLY how she felt. Maybe the key for me is to discover how she dealt with it, the shunning.
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