My Teenage Son's Father's Day Tribute

Mark and I received quite a surprise Sunday when our 15-year-old son posted a tribute to us on Instagram. With his permission, I am publishing screen shots of this tribute here on my blog. Needless to say, we are very proud of Nathan.

Archives: The Prince and the Gay Pea

“The divorce classes this evening were emotionally draining.* I kept thinking of the children. I feel I have failed them. But I have tried to do the best I could. Not for the first time, I am reminded how perversely unfair it seems that I – of all men [given my homosexuality and background] – have had such a large family of children. I wish to love them all, to nurture them all, but it has been difficult to escape the ‘herd mentality.’ I am reminded of thoughts I have had on other occasions: do I get credit for trying?  

“ … Guilt. What if I just say, ‘Yes!  Yes! Yes! I am guilty as charged! I am a frail, faulty human who has tried to play the hand he was dealt to the best of his ability, but I have failed in some important respects. Yes!  I’m guilty!’ What if I just let go of trying to hold onto the illusion of innocence, if I stopped trying to justify myself? Why is this concept of ‘fault’ so all pervasive, so powerful? Is this a desperate attempt by the Ego to excuse itself?  Wouldn’t I be a lot more at peace if I just said, ‘Yes! I’m guilty … Now what? How much of my life have I spent trying to justify myself? To escape guilt … for my sexuality and other things?”

These are feelings and thoughts I expressed in my journal [in January 2012] as I tried to process the feelings I had after attending state-mandated divorce classes - one of the last hurdles on my way to completing the legal divorce process. 

As I pondered what I had felt and thought during and after those classes, I dimly sensed how feelings of guilt had, throughout my life, pushed me – or rather pursued me – to achieve unrealistic goals and an unreasonable standard of conduct. That’s just it: my life became all about conduct, rather than living. I was an actor on a stage, and my performance never satisfied me or others.

In talking about these things with my partner [my now-husband], he mentioned the fairy tale The Princess and the Pea, analogizing that “guilt” is like that pea hidden under all those mattresses, under all the layers of the psyche that one constructs to try to hide the feelings engendered by the guilt.

For obvious reasons, I prefer to re-name the tale, The Prince and the Pea. The analogy has its limits, perhaps, but one is prompted to ask, “If the prince hadn’t been so hypersensitive, he wouldn’t have cared about or been able to feel the freakin’ pea.”

I thus, in this sense, get back to the questions I posed in my journal:  Is guilt a function of the Ego, is blame the fuel that feeds it, and are justification, self-flagellation and self-defeating/self-hating behaviors the Ego’s tools for dealing with it? Does the entire Judeo-Christian tradition/religion furnish the fuel that stokes this furnace? Can I escape all this by simply surrendering?

In this regard, a couple of passages come to mind that I read in Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now:

“Instead of having a wall of resistance inside you that gets constantly and painfully hit by things that ‘should not be happening,’ let everything pass through you … Instead of going into unconscious reaction and negativity, such as attack, defense or withdrawal, you let it pass right through you. Offer no resistance.  It is as if there is nobody there to get hurt anymore …  

“Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace.  This is the miracle of surrender.”

Guilt, for the average gay person who has been raised or otherwise spent a significant amount of time in the LDS Church, is actually more like a boulder, rather than a pea. It sits there underneath so many layers that it sometimes seems we will never be able to find it and remove it.

But until we are able to remove it, we can at least do what Tolle suggests, i.e., accepting the presence of the boulder (or pea) instead of trying to pretend it’s not there, letting its presence cause us suffering, and/or complaining endlessly about its presence. Doing so allows us to examine the guilt, reduce its size and, eventually, dissolve it. This is what I have tried to do and am trying to do, and I know that – eventually – I will be free of it.

*This is a slightly edited version of a post that was originally published on one of my blogs that is now closed.

Mormon Essays: Virtue in Pain

We were, by all appearances, the “perfect” Mormon family.* My ex-wife and I appeared to have a good marriage. Our children were (and are, and always shall be) awesome. We were all active and faithful. The Gospel was at the center of our lives. We were, by all appearances, living the Plan of Happiness.

But things weren’t quite what they appeared to be. 

Both converts to the Church, my ex-wife had I had both felt (i.e., we had a “testimony”) that we were supposed to get married (even though I knew I was strongly attracted to men), that this was God’s will for us and, therefore, what would bring us happiness.  

Like many Mormons, we believed that the rather huge obstacles we would face in the short- and long-term were merely confirmations of God’s will (rather than indicators that we had perhaps made a mistake). This belief, i.e., we can tell how “true” or “right” something is by how difficult it makes our life - that there is virtue in pain - infuses the Mormon worldview. (Not sure how this jives with "... men are that they might have joy.")

This life is intended to be a struggle. 

We are diamonds in the rough, which must be polished by the buffetings of life in order to bring out our true beauty. (But weren't we always diamonds, just not as buff?)  

We have to be tried and tested in all things, and the greater the trials, the greater the glory at the end of the race. 

Challenges are an indication that we are on the right path. After all, Satan doesn’t bother people who aren’t doing Heavenly Father’s will. Right?

How many Mormon households have a picture on the wall of their home that features an image of Jesus and the words, “I never said it would be easy; I only said it would be worth it” (which is actually not scripture but is in fact attributed to Mae West)?

The fact is that my ex-wife and I had very little in common when we got married. We were raised in locations 3000 miles from each other. We were in fact from different countries. We had totally different interests and had had very different life experiences. Common sense would tell us that we didn’t belong together.

What had brought us together in the first place, however, and what had convinced us that we were meant to meet and marry, were some unusual circumstances and experiences that occurred shortly after we met that convinced us that it was Heavenly Father’s will that we marry – despite our differences and despite the warning signs that arose before and after our wedding.  

As we encountered them, we both truly believed that the challenges and obstacles we faced were (i) indicators that we were on the right path, and (ii) refining experiences that would, in the end, help us to overcome “baggage” from our respective pasts and ultimately make us better and happier people. The fact that I (as well as she) was intensely unhappy most of the time was simply confirmation that I was doing something right, that I had done the right thing by getting married.  Right?

We would face many, many challenges in the years ahead. Graduate school. Having children. Dealing with financial stresses and strains that were present from the very beginning of our marriage and would never cease to plague us. Dealing with cultural differences. Unpacking and working through “baggage” that each of us brought into the marriage – baggage that in my case included dealing with the after-effects of child abuse.  Cross-country moves.  Career changes.  Other challenges.

These challenges took their toll on our marriage. There were times when we both felt like we couldn’t go on. Yet, the memory of those extraordinary experiences that had led to our marriage in the first place continued to sustain us; the belief that God had brought us together was the central myth of our marriage. We believed that true happiness would come from continuing to work through the challenges we faced (including, in my case, dealing with my inner homosexuality) and forging ahead on the path that lay before us. Besides, we couldn’t deny those early experiences because that would mean that our marriage had been based upon a fraud – a thought too horrible to contemplate.

Looking back, it was precisely these challenges that (deceptively) united us. I later realized (as I think did my ex-wife), that these challenges merely deflected attention from the “chronic” problems of our marriage. Thus, when these challenges passed, when these hurdles had been cleared, the unifying effect of these experiences evaporated and we were faced with some stark realities that we had successfully swept under the rug for years.

These realities led to conflict that had long been suppressed. Though we had experienced difficulties in the past, it became clear that our marriage was in very serious trouble. We continued limping along, having good days and bad days, more bad than good, sustained by the belief that, since God had arranged our marriage in the first place, we would eventually get through these challenges; we just had to find the way out of the maze and everything would be fine. 

We were wrong.  

As I’ve written elsewhere, my acceptance of my homosexuality was the final nail in the coffin of our marriage. It was only after coming out that I realized the degree to which my repressed homosexuality had probably affected our marriage from day one. I realized that we had been wrong to ignore the warning signs, wrong to view life simply as a challenge to be endured, a cross to be borne, a vale to merely pass through. 

We had sacrificed ourselves to an ideal, and at the end of the day, what we discovered is …

We had sacrificed ourselves.

*This post was originally published on my Invictus Pilgrim blog (now closed) in August 2011. It is the first in a number of posts that I plan to re-publish here. These posts probed my changing relationship to the Mormon Church and my evolving beliefs concerning the truthfulness of Mormonism and its impact upon my life.

Am I Metal?

Mark told me something yesterday morning that deeply disturbed me. It added to the anxiety and concern that I already felt with respect to my younger children, but to my son Levi in particular.

Background: The first night of our Disneyland trip, we stayed overnight in Las Vegas. Once we arrived at our modest hotel and unloaded, the kids got in their swim suits and jumped in the pool. Mark was out there, poolside, with his new camera, taking some great pictures of the kids. He had only recently purchased the camera, to replace one that he had lost on our Corsica trip last fall.

Later that evening, we went over to The Strip to gape at the hotels and casinos we passed on our way to dinner, somewhere. Mark pulled into the Bellagio and we ended up in their cafe for dinner. When we went to pay the bill, there was a problem with our credit card (subsequently sorted out), so Mark got up to go get a different credit card from the truck. Aaron went with him. I tried to use the debit card, but it is not the Visa kind, so is not universally accepted. I finally got up and went to an ATM, got out some cash, came back to the table and paid the bill. Then Levi, Esther and I got up to meet Mark outside.

None of us realized until the following morning that Mark's camera bag had been left at the table. Calls were made. It wasn't in lost and found. No one had turned it in. It had been stolen. More calls to security at the Bellagio and to the Las Vegas police department to file reports. Finally, a little later than planned and upset by the experience, we headed on to Disneyland.

We tried to assure the children that everything was fine. That yes, someone had stolen the bag and the camera, and yes that wasn't a nice thing to do; but life goes on. We were particularly sensitive because I had recently been discovering the extent to which the little kids have been exposed to adult problems over at the other house. Financial worries. Stress. Anxiety. Contention. They had, unbeknownst to me, been experiencing things to which no child should be exposed. Boundaries had been not only crossed, but erased.

Fast forward to last Sunday night. The kids had gone down to the local Lutheran churchyard to play, and Annie - so I found out later - had found a necklace that she brought home. Levi had been deeply concerned that Annie had stolen it and said as much to Mark. Then Levi brought up the subject of the stolen camera and how that was bad and the person(s) who stole it had done a very bad thing.

Mark again tried to ease Levi's anxieties by saying to him, "It's okay, Levi. It was just pieces of metal and glass and plastic. It's not really important."

A few moments passed. Mark went to take the garbage out, and as he passed Levi who was sitting on the front porch, he looked up at Mark and said, "Am I metal?" Mark said he had been so taken aback by Levi's comment, so deeply saddened, that all he could do at the time was say, "No, Levi, of course you're not metal." 

I did not hear about this until the following morning. When I heard this story, I too was deeply saddened, for this comment seemed to indicate a vast pool of "stuff" inside Levi, a product of his repeated and prolonged exposure to adult problems that he shouldn't have been exposed to. 

But what does it mean? "Am I metal?" Does he think he's not important? That's he's something that could be easily walked away from? That if he was lost or stolen, no one would care? What?

Whatever it means, it reveals a vast lake of sadness within Levi. It also added tremendously to my anxiety for him and, once again, deeply saddened me that things are the way they are. Divorce sucks, but things haven't needed to be the way they have been. They don't need to be the way they are. And so I am left pondering what I can and will do about it.

******

Note: Mark subsequently left the following comment, and I'm incorporating it here because I want to make sure people see it:

"We have a notion that our sense of self is related to thoughts, emotions, and physical things. Witness children who at a very young age will put up a huge fuss and scream when an insignificant toy or object is taken from them. It is so distressing because the object has become their sense of self which of course is not the case. We teach this to our children by example as adults.  

"Levi expected that I should have been outraged and vehemently chastise and curse the thief which I didn't do. I told Levi that it was just my camera. A piece of metal, nothing to get upset about. What saddened me when he later asked me if he was metal was his presumed thought being that he too may not valued and could as easily be thought of as insignificant and discarded or abandoned. Was this just a contemplation he had or is he truly fearful of this happening to him. We suspect the later may be the case. 

"Interestingly, what I thought I was doing was teaching him about the insignificance of material possession and it backfired. What I took away is that we as parents can and do try and posses our children and make them a part of our sense of self and in so doing continue the pattern of insecurity when there is a threat of abandonment."

A Red-Letter Day

Yesterday was a red-letter day.

We arrived safely in Maui and, by the time we got our rental car, drove to our condo, did a bit of grocery shopping and drove to the beach, we still had about five hours of good beach time. It was wonderful.

The view from the balcony of the condo we're renting.

I don't have a lot of time to write this morning because I woke up during the night with a huge migraine which I think was triggered by a host of things, but in particular the barbecue chicken pizza we had last night, which I suspect was laced with MSG. This caused a slow start to the day, and we're off to the beach again, so I hope to write more this evening. Yesterday, we had time to swim in the ocean, soak up the sun and watch the sunset.  

At Little Beach

The other reason yesterday was a red-letter day: As we were waiting in baggage claim for our suitcase, I received email confirmation from my lawyer that the divorce decree was entered yesterday.  So I am now officially divorced. After all this time, it was both cause for exhilaration (to have that process behind me) and reflection. Jean and I were married almost 25 years when we separated and we had 10 children together. The formal end to that marriage is, despite all my other emotions, a solemn moment.