We are family?

Thursday night at the phenomenal Girl Talk: A Cis & Trans Woman Dialogue, curated by Julia Serano and Gina de Vries, Ryka Aoki de la Cruz talked about family, about how if we're family how can we 'outreach' to each other? Families who've been separated have reunions, not outreach -- it was brilliant (as were each of the other performances shared at that show) and of course there were many more points she made and images she shared in her piece...

And this one, though, sticks in me -- sticks in my troubles -- the way performers talk about family sometimes, how we should treat each other more like family, meaning we should treat each other better, more kindly, with more open hearts, right? I guess that's how my inside hopeful heartsick places interpret that phrase.

But I think we do treat each other like family, already, unfortunately. 'Cause what are our experiences of family? We drop one another when it's expedient, we shut each other out and off. We take sexual advantage and then turn our backs. Isn't that family?

I get tired (and by tired I mean heartbroken-sad) of hearing about family like it should be understandable, like by referencing family as a metaphor for unconditional-yet-complicated love and acceptance, I will understand what that means. But I don't. My history of family is retracted love, pure and unabashed abandonment, extremely painful attempts at reconnection across severed ties -- and now we're supposed to make family together, you and me, we in these queer communities, and family, to me, looks like the horrifying inbred, yes, incestuous (and I use that metaphor deliberately) difficult raw puritanical stuff we have created and find ourselves struggling against.

'Cause I understand what she's talking about (how we don't outreach to family -- so how are you going to talk about 'outreaching' to queer folks of color, for example, to transwomen, to the others who are 'underrepresented' at the mainstream white queer gatherings that many of us find ourselves participating in), and I love it with all the inside webs of my heart.

But/And, also -- we need a different word.

I understand about needing replacements, about using and reclaiming 'family' to mean queer sisterbrothers and brothersisters, but we bring with that word all the baggage that shaped us crooked and raw and bent and ashamed and scarred. We carry into that word, and this new collection of people we're trying to connect with, all the pain that that word learned to bear, all the while we were learning to keep ourselves alive within its bounds, until it was gone.

How do we make 'family' good? How can we engender that word into something worthwhile, settle into it with a sense of hope instead of trepidation? You say we are family -- to me that means there is no hope between us, no common language, a warped tongue, an indelible severing. That's where I grow out of.

Not outreach but reunion. Maybe this truth of family is the way of all of us, and reunion will be painful alongside possible, as much as when I return to my blood family and see the shapes that crafted me and feel cup around my face each pair of arms and every set of hands that released me into the grip of a monster. Is that how we feel each other -- that we sisters and brothers and others haven't stood up for each other enough, haven't protected each other enough, haven't sent enough letters or enough I Miss You cards, or called enough to hear how your life is, to hear how he blessedness flows and hear how the hurts hit you and how can I share in both?

I don't do those parts very well, I'll admit it, the reaching out. She says we don't outreach to family, and I get her meaning, and and and -- I always feel like it's an outreach when I try to touch anyone with a tie to my insides: old friends, blood family -- a tentative feeling those lines: Are we still connected? Have you dropped me yet?

More and more thinking on this to come ... so many thanks to you, Ryka, for these considerations, this possibility, your words!

what do I want to tell you in 10 minutes

060109

What do I want to tell you in ten minutes? That I was catapulted into shame-slavery and prosto-destitution is only one strand of this miner's fabric. There's the way I used to cuddle and curl under a yew bush (that still today I spell like "ewe," like mama sheep, and so maybe she was a haven, too, in her funny fur curly like the dark green fronds of the bush)         anyway         how the yew bush grew like a cave up and around space, and I could sweep brush the dirt floor, bring books, shelter myself early from my mother's storms.

Sheltering self in words, which were always a haven, as far back as I can remember, although I don't think I can say they're natural, at least they're clean.

The details and rough sketch outline include three houses in and around middle-Eastern Nebraska by the age of 6, and about four more by the age of 10, and then there was only one even if that one didn't include my father         he had his own home         and it was an hour southwest from The One         down the black ribbon of interstate 80 that cut through dark green cottonwood and oak and tall rushes living the sides of the highway, filled with red-winged blackbirds         cutting across the broad flat damp sandbar of the Platte River and all its attendant mosquitoes and the echoes of sandhill cranes that were never there on the river when we rushed by in Mom's burgundy-red Mercury Monarch or dad's too-dull-bright orange and white-capped Volkswagen Van         that road led back and forth to Dad's house, not grandmother's (over the river and through those woods)         but slowly the road began to disintegrate, disappear         for lack of use         they're still rebuilding every time I go back         more construction, more hope

once we entered The One house the last one there wasn't any room for another         the town was too small for the both of them         and one turned around and let himself out.

We saw a double rainbow on the way out of Nebraska after my grandmother's funeral

4/13/09

Sunflowers are golden. Tarnish is not golden, unless it’s on earrings that were too silvery shiny to begin with and they needed some dark – lilacs and freshly broken playground rocks and crocus blooming through the last of the winter snow and seeing the redbuds on the maple tree and trusting that Spring was really, actually, finally coming for real this time: all golden. Snowstorms in mid-April and a brown Christmas: not golden.

These are the nature things, the Midwest things, the snow shoe shallow things, the walking back home things.

Walking through love into a wall of fear is not golden but bursting that fear with one's faith in oneself and thick love for one’s compatriots is so golden it’s liquid.

He asked me not to bring you because he’s afraid of how it’ll look if you show up there with me, all of my fierce queer family un our leather and pansy dresses and tattoos and brave dye jobs and outspokenness and brazen truth fever and strong flaring unflinching eyes, all of us and our hands locked with lovers or tricks, our hands outstretched toward the pale bodies of a town in the middle of Nebraska that’s not all that far, in philosophical terms, from where Brandon Teena was murdered.

He asked me to come alone, without you, and unspoken was: you can fix your hair nice and put on a black skirt and no one would be the wiser. He wanted me to leave you off the list of my grandmother’s mourners, you heavily-mascaraed boys and fine suit-n-tie wearing girls. He wanted me to put my politics on the slide and my love on the swing and let them occupy themselves while my naked shameful body said goodbye to the woman who taught me about steadiness and safety and comfort and rhubarb-strawberry pie.

He says that if the other mourners see you, they will forget what they were gathered for, they will forget the woman whose life they are at the United Methodist to celebrate and remember, they will turn away from her and focus only on you, on us, on all of us in our un-American oddity.

And I remind him that I have grown from the seed that she planted and they tended, this middlest of middle America, with their water and sunlight and locusts and lies, with their long farms and endless faith and foreverable silencings, with their protestant hymns and communal supers and casseroles brought to the homes of the ill and the dying and all the unspoken sorrows of 200 years of homesteading: I am the fruit of those labors, harvested. They cannot deny us our legacy or our home. They can consider us abnormal, but if we are of them, then we are as strawberry-rhubarb as they are.

I am tired of these transparencies lain over my life, the requests to just be in the closet a little while – as if the closets our families lived in weren’t the most hospitable breeding ground for abuse, as if I want to refabricate those conditions, as if I don’t want to bring some queer sunshine into my family’s hometown, some golden probability for the one or three queer kids still living there and seeing themselves reflected nowhere, living between the crosshatch of Brandon and Matthew, expecting the closet is their only refuge.

He says my grandmother would never ask, herself, that I hide you, and unspoken it’s always unspoken is the point that she would prefer it that way but I look through her photo albums and find, among all the images of grandchildren and their families, several pictures of me with my ex-wife, and I see my grandmother honoring who I am, who she silently, steadily, helps me to be.