Mommies don’t cry.
Mommies don’t cry.
Mommies don’t…
I couldn’t even finish my own self soothing mantra as I held back tears. I glanced at myself in the visor mirror between watching the busy highway.
‘I’m going to lose my Mommy‘ I kept hearing his voice say on repeat in my head.
I knew I would have to get it together before I got back to The Queendom. My other partners were going about their normal day-to-day duties. I didn’t want to bring this parallel poly issue home with me. This wasn’t the first time we’d broken up – I actually can’t remember if it’s been three or four times – but this felt like it could be the last time.
I tried not to think of the look in The Gardner’s eyes on the afternoon I had left his home after a tense, emotional-filled, discussion. I felt numb. I didn’t know how we had gone from six years of late night laughing and bonding, traversing a smattering of life’s challenges, entered into a MDlb dynamic to not being able to be communicate without an argument following but here we were.
The destination I feared most: Polytown – Detour: Boundaries.
To be fair I had been visiting this place repeatedly during our time together in increments here and there. But when it came time to gauge my comfort level with him, everything collapsed. For years I have clamored on about polyamory and its pros and cons. I’ve held classes about how to navigate it, and given my practiced opinion on it to those who have asked.
But the truth is, I hate polyamory.
As a teenager I never wanted to wear any one guy’s class ring or jacket. I didn’t want to trade love notes and wait outside of sports fields for my ‘beau’, and dances? I famously went to multiple schools’ dances so I could go with a different guy. I didn’t crush on guys because no one ever felt “unattainable” to me. They were just people. I was constantly poked and prodded about what was “wrong with me”. How did I expected to find my future husband if I had commitment self discovery issues? For me, being polyamorous has always felt like the reluctant answer and not the eager question to describe myself. However, I’d be a liar to say I haven’t felt the real burdens of it over the last 19 years.
I will most likely only be able to watch from the sidelines as many of my peers will have life events and milestones that I will not.
I will forgo classic traditions in lieu of attempting to form ones uniquely my own.
I will always have to skew who and how I live in public for the majority of people I meet, until I assess my safety to be ‘out’ to them.
Polyamory is often considered a choice and not an orientation in an “official” capacity, meaning some people will argue with me until they are blue in the face that I am “choosing” to be polyamorous. I have argued the opposite for years and years but think I may be ready to take a closer look at my life…choice.
When I started down this path, I had told myself that it was to fill my kinky need while dating vanilla guys. But I stopped hearing that little voice in my head a many years ago. I didn’t notice when poly went from being a choice to a self-identifying orientation for me. I have always had multiple partners and found monogamy to not fit my general way of being. I read an article once where a polyamorist described monogamy as such
“…like wearing shoes two sizes too small – you can cram your foot in there momentarily, but you won’t like it and you won’t be able to walk very far.”
This always stuck with me. I always felt like this described how I felt well.
Cramped.
Stuffed into a role I never thought I fit into. That was great because The Gardner said he could never be in that role either.
Cramped.
But that’s exactly how him and I lived for six years. As unit, a pair, left shoe, right shoe, in the beginning we were together for days and weeks on end, cramped – and yet it didn’t feel cramped. In fact, I forgot about “feeling” poly and felt more like I was “choosing” poly as our time went on. I know only about 4% of the U.S. identify as polyamorous. So when I find others who share my views, I usually want to engage them and trade knowledge. That was easy for us to share. We had shared so much of ourselves with each other and explored places within not often visited. So why was figuring out polyamory boundaries the one place we were having a hard time going “together”? Was it our past mistakes? The lack of trust? Personality differences? A sense of losing one’s self? Had we been so cramped we had forgotten where we were?
I am crafting a life where I’m in charge. I call the shots; the who, the what, the how, and the why. He believed he didn’t fit into the 24/7 Queendom I was building. Despite my efforts in offering my mind and body to him regularly to show otherwise. And maybe he was right, just like other things, I chose to build my life around my Female-Led outlook on life. I had chosen this. Of course, I had chosen to break my heart again. I had chosen to feel torn between what I had always done over an unknown way of living and creating. I had chosen to let my heart and head go at it for months in a seemingly endless battle.
I had chosen to be polyamorous.
Even with my own jealousy, uncertainty, personal triggers, and narrow scope of ethnical non-monogamy/polyamory via a majority of active polyandry, I had chosen to live my life this way. I couldn’t be upset at him. I couldn’t be upset at myself. We were two poly-minded people who had tried to come together and cram ourselves in spaces we might not have been able to fit into. All in the name of l-o-v-e.
We had chosen to go through this experience together one way or another. Whether he meant to or not and no matter what I feel in this moment, I know The Gardner watered my mind for deeper self reflection. That is what I am choosing to take from this experience. This is the only way I can heal. I am choosing not to get focused on all the weeds but maybe the last flower to bloom, which hopefully is within myself.
I will learn to tend to my own garden much better before trying to help something/someone else bloom. I will ask myself the tough questions before hunkering down to plant for the season and seasons beyond. I will be responsible for my own ability to get sunshine and raindrops. I will need to look closer at what I am “choosing” to grow versus what grows naturally and ask myself if I am being my truly authentic self and there’s something else I should be choosing for myself…