Reflections on gender neutral parenting, life after the fire, and the ever present struggle fer sovereignty and emotional safety when you share a child with an abuser...I don't know why some days feel harder than others. I guess it's that way fer most of us. Maybe it's just the time of year fer it to feel harder. Anniversaries of life altering moments have a way of fuckin' with my frequency. Three years, n only I n my ancestors know the full range of the trauma that's been unpacked since that day. Three years since I packed a bag, pulled away in that ol' VW and left in hopes that it would be the beginning of better. Three years and some days I can still feel the fire burst my heart apart and crawl up my skin. I can say that that day was the beginning of better, but the first two years were so dark and so concerned with harm reduction that there was no indication that this was so. Also, my ideas about how things could get better were so very narrow and dependent upon an abuser realizing that they were abusive, being accountable fer their abuse, and understanding the importance of restoration.
Silly me.
This person spoke only in the language of the state and knew only of leveraging their systems, and through them was able to bypass any need fer accountability, making it nearly impossible fer me to maintain any semblance of sovereignty er boundaries.
Bless me, through the ever present support of a highly trained conflict worker, I've been able to maintain no contact fer most of these three years. I've not had to have direct contact or direct interaction with him, despite being ordered to by a judge. The judge gave me only one option fer avoiding direct contact with my abuser, which was and still is very costly to me. But, thanks to good friends and skilled a conflict worker, I was and am still able to maintain this boundary. Once this boundary was in place and could legally be enforced, my head began to clear just a bit. The gaslighting stopped; and i began to understand the full spectrum of psychological and emotional abuse that was present in every interaction and dynamic we shared.
There were those early months when I was still committed to possibility. When I thought that if I just xxx, yyy, er zzz'd, then he would see me. Then he would hear me. When i thought that if I just loved him through it, then he might love me through it too. But thank goodness fer my friends and peer counselors and trauma therapist who heard me and the mangled mess my mind had become and urged me to go no contact with him until there was a formal mediated accountability and restoration process in place. Bless you folk, you know who you are. I never ever could have anticipated the punishment and consequences of enforcing a no contact boundary, and neither could have any of you, i know. And on the other side of it all, I wouldn't have done anything different. He and he alone is responsible fer his response to this boundary. In the time of no contact, I learned that I didn't genuinely love this person at all. What I felt towards him was a result of trauma bonding, gaslighting, and the ever alternating relational conditions between lovebombing and emotional neglect.
When I was sued, I put my money on hiring and maintaining a conflict worker and in trusting in their process. The other party put his on a bloodsucking win at all costs high priced lawyer and their trust in the antiquated family law system. I was low hanging fruit fer them, with my radical ideas about gender neutral parenting, living simply, political activism, feminism & toxic masculinity. And of course my lifetime of gendered trauma; details of my life that were shared in intimacy and then leveraged in a court room. I left those hearings with my heart stripped down to bare threads and dreamt at night about lighting myself on fire on the courthouse steps.
The alchemical process that took place inside me during those years turned me into soup on the inside. There was no part of me left that wasn't in the cauldron. It hurt to breath, it hurt to think, it hurt to be. For two years I'd lay my bones on the earth, under the sun and the rain and the snow; under trees, next to the ocean, on top of mountains, in my own garden, and let hours pass. I salted the earth with rivers of tears and prayed for her to please please please gobble me up. And she did, in her way.
By the beginning of the third year I knew that the work of the day was in me being able to find sovereignty (that is, to feel like a sovereign being) even under these dreadfully painful and incarcerating circumstances. It was hard fer me to imagine ever feeling sovereign again, binded by chains that i measured in tons and tethered to an abuser who held state sanctioned control over the structural details of my life. But I considered how since the day I was birthed I had lived under colonial rule, state violence, domestication, industrialism, gendered/class/racial oppression, and the effects of trauma. And hadn't I been able to find my sovereignty despite these circumstances? i considered how i had managed those previous states of sovereignty, and found that these states were built on the notion that the oppressive powers and social conditions were illegitimate.
They were constructs.
They weren't real.
Enforced solely through state violence.
And so then it began, there at the start of that third year. I dedicated my heart space to deconstructing and reconstructing my relationship to my life conditions. Understanding that though there may be papers that were filed by an abusive man who could fathom no other way forward, signed by a conservative judge who is sworn to uphold an illegitimate and antiquated system, they are just that; papers. Nothing more. There are real challenges that I must endure for a finite period of time, but these papers do not change my Truths. They do not validate his abuse during and after the relationship, his bypassing of accountability, er his exploitation of state power. Just because something has legal standing behind it, doesn't make it moral, er right, er just. We all know that.
Once my relationship to the circumstances began changing, things got better.
SO MUCH BETTER. Life these days is full of luv n hopes n dreams n adventure n learnin'. I hardly want fer a thang, cept the freedom to make my home in the place where my heart feels at home. But, I've gotten good at trusting in the process, and so I invoke patience and trust fer the day that I'll be able to go home, and stay home.
So, why sometimes does that fire still burst out and make that ol' river of tears flow? Whelp, that's just the nature of healing and processing trauma. This trauma werk ain't no linear walk. It's crooked as fuck and some days ya gatta bushwhack a new path cuz ya ain't met this intersection yet. Lucky me, new edges to explore.
These days, most of the pain is felt in remembering the community betrayal. Remembering how I named the abuse and called upon close mutual friends and community folks to help me hold this person accountable because I was having no success at doing it alone. And, how those folks failed to provide the support that could've changed everything. How some of those folks continued to maintain close friendships with him and even began intimate relationships with him, disregarding the Truths i had told. That is a pain that still burns pretty hot.
In this last year i've had several of those folks email and text me to say that they were sorry and that they regret their inaction and wanna make it right. And after every one of these messages i get, I spend a few days gushing tears. I can't help it. It's all part of the process.
They have told me of how they can see him as the person i named; abusive and in need of an accountability process. They tell me that he is a mess of a person, and that they miss me in their lives. I don't know the details or motivations behind these messages cuz i've chosen that at this point, my eyes n heart are looking forward. Not, back. I have no incentive to respond to any of these messages. But still, I am relieved to know that time has shown him fer who he is and to be validated in my Truths. Even three years later.
All I have to say to them folks is this:
I wish you would have believed me then, when it mattered.
Because you didn't, awful things happened to me and my children.
Because you didn't, I would never be able to trust in your friendship.
Because you didn't, I remain bound and tethered to an abuser.
I hope that you have told him all these things you are telling me.
And that is all I've got to say about that.
And at the heart of all this story and life, there is my very best life partner and the luv of my life; the Lorax. I be mama to three and granny to one, and I ain't never met a soul like them. maybe cuz we was just meant to be this way with each other. I dunno, I'll leave that to the Mystery.
I've been raising this creature outside of the gender binary fer nearly four of their five and a half years of life. I decided to be gender neutral in my parenting for many reasons, but what most factored was how at two and a half years of age, I could see them, really see them as a being that was not for the binary. A creature whose expressions of life were just too dang wide to fit in those constructs. I watched them sing and dance, and develop compassion and empathy, and tend to flowers, and pick out glittery pretty dresses to wear, and birth and nurse their babies and tell me they couldn't wait to be a mama. i couldn't bear to see them socialized in a way that would slowly over time take those expressions away from them. And so, i did my very best to create an environment that would nurture and encourage developing gender fluidity. They live their life outside of the binary and any human who spends any amount of time with them know that this creature is gender queer as fuck.
it was my expectation i guess that they would embrace the gender neutrality that I had nurtured them with, and keep their they/them pronouns. This year though, they have been very clear in their request fer she/her pronouns, declaring to me and their peers that they are a girl. And i am doing my very best to support them in this preference, and as you can see I am still very attached to gender neutrality in referencing them. And I worry about misgendering them, and am doing my best to understand how to meet them in a good way. I wonder; if the whole idea of gender neutral parenting is to give them the freedom to decide their own gender identity, at what point do you stop being neutral in yer parenting and use their preferred gender pronouns?
All I know is that i've got a whole lot of reading and reflecting and asking of questions to do. But I'm dedicated to this process, and I know that they exist outside that binary and they are not only aware of it, but they also understand it and have learned that they and only they get to decide their gender identity and expression. And, thanks to The Moon's Nest Playschool, they also get to grow and learn with other kiddos who live outside the gender binary er at the very least support, comprehend, and normalize them and their gender fluidity.
Whatta life they get to live!
And so to circle back to the question of why some days are harder than others...
The other day Lorax confided in me and expressed that their other parent misgenders them all the time, and they "really don't like that." I heard them and saw the pain that this brought them, and as I listened I felt the anger and the rage towards this person stir and rise up inside of me. And I remembered how he had refused to support my gender neutral parenting practices and go out of his way to misgender my Lorax and even utilize this as part of his court case. How was I supposed to support this kiddo and give them the tools to stand in their own power with this person?? I took a breath and told them that the they might try using the verbiage of consent that they know so very well. "You could say I don't identify as that gender and i don't consent to you using that pronoun fer me." i suggested.
And to that they replied, "i did say that but my dad doesn't believe in consent."
And, with that, I had to still my heart. So much rage and anger flooded me, that I could hardly breath. What can you say to a child who can't get their other parent to gender them as they prefer? What can you say to a child who tells you that their other parent doesn't believe in consent? Gender neutrality, accountability and consent; three of the major topics that i have chosen to focus my parenting practices on, all rejected and trivialized by their other parent.
All i could find to say was, "we'll keep trying to come up with ideas fer you. i'll keep thinkin on it and you do too, okay? And, you know that it doesn't matter what anyone says. Only you have the right to decide who you are. I love you."
All I could find say to myself and my heart was "trust in the process. this one will know and this one will see. all in good time, y'all will be free."
All i can say to you is:
STOP FREAKIN' MISGENDERING MAH LORAX