Marking

One of the things that interests me about people is the way people do rituals, recognise and solemnise important things to them with patterns.

And I've got a lot of thoughts about this, some of it religious, some of it not, but I tend towards the opinion that people tend to ritualise important things, rites of passage, things they want recognised, in some way or another. Or use extant rituals for other things, trying to make the transitions matter -- a graduation ceremony or a senior prom as an adulthood rite, or even the acquisition of a driver's license as an adulthood ordeal -- when existing rituals don't do what they need.

I could write more about this; I have a lot of philosophy of ritual. But partially in the wake of the Iowa court mandating that same-sex couples have access to the legal marriage ritual in its county of jurisdiction, I find myself thinking about marriage.

I tend to see the whole discussion of same-sex marriage rights in terms of defining the ritual, you see. Which throws people, sometimes, so to try to lay out where I'm coming from in straightforward terms:

- cultures have rituals to mark important things and transitions;
- this is a normal trait, not a positive or a negative thing;
- marriage is frequently such a ritual;
- in my culture of origin, 'marriage' is the ritual for constituting a recognised partnership;
- people will feel free to ignore partnerships that are not properly constituted by their standards;
- this is normal.

I also add to this:

- cultural unity is in part defined by shared rituals;
- disruption of the rituals of a culture is a potentially culture-destroying event.

Which gets me nods from the folks who disagree with me on the whole marriage thing, with that okay, you understand where we're coming from face, up until I point out that this is exactly why it matters for same-sex couples to be able to marry. 'Cause I sit here and go, "Okay. If marriage is limited, then the culture will split into people who come up with an alternate ritual for relationship recognition that includes same-sex couples and the people who don't, and that completely undermines marriage as the ritual for partnership recognition. It is a therefore a threat to marriage to have people forming and ritualising partnerships that cannot go through the cultural hoops."

Right about there people start going all headspinny on me for some reason. Because I don't think that letting people into the ritual that weren't allowed in before threatens it; I think the coming up with alternative ritualisations is what's the cultural warping thing. We've already had the cultural shift that brings people out to where they're able to form partnerships with who they love (rather than past patterns of obligation and similar things) and, like humans everywhere, want to ritually acknowledge those relationships; using the same rituals for this as have been done in the past is a matter of avoiding wild change and unnecessary and potentially risky innovation.

So there's a difference in perspective about what counts as rearranging, you know? Come up with whole new rituals and schism the society based on which rituals one recognises, or change who gets into the ritual at all and see who that alienates.

And ... okay, that photo there? That's from after the ritualisation that was my collaring. And you know, going through that ritual was a big deal to me, something that does a lot for my sense of safety and security in the relationship, simply because it was a ritualisation. And it has trappings that some folks would recognise, if I happen to, say, go out wearing that mark, like I did at the Flea.

It's not a marriage, though. It's an essentially between him and me thing, though it gets some recognition in the sense of awareness of what the symbols mean elsewhere. It doesn't bring in the community and say, "Here, this is our partnership. This is what we're trying to build here, among you." Whether or not one assigns religious significance to the thing (I don't personally have a religion that does, but I'm quite well aware that the surrounding culture does in fact have a religion that includes matrimony), there's still that people and the surrounding world, being recognised, being real to them.

Nothing is going to stop people reaching for being real, for marking their lives with ritual that joins them to their communities.

People look for marks.

Fathering In The Borderlands

One of the things that comes up as I go through and read and reread my BPD resources is the value and importance of other support structures to keeping a kid growing up with a borderline parent from sinking into the potential damage that that can induce. Markham's Behavioral Health talks about the importance of fathers and the role of the "enlightened witness" -- someone the child believes understands what is going on and can give some support, a reality touchstone. Understanding the Borderline Mother quotes someone talking about the risks of an 'emotionally invalidating environment'.

And it's easy to say, "Oh, right, a non-borderline parent would be able to stand up for the kid, protect them from the crazy", but ... it's actually a lot subtler than that. And I don't know whether a white knight would have been more useful, but I don't really think so.

I told my mother off a few months ago, told her some behaviour was not acceptable and I wasn't going to put up with it. She sent me back a, "Did you send me email? I thought I saw something, but I must've deleted it when I was clearing my spam. If you didn't send anything, la la silly me I'm just getting old." I forwarded the original message in reply. She didn't speak to me for two and a half months.

I told my father about that a bit afterwards, and he commented, "I'd never have been brave enough to do that." My father is ... not confrontational. (I get all my confrontational from Mom.) And he explained, among other things, that one of the reasons he was not brave enough to stand up to her was that he was afraid that she would take out being riled up on me, or on my brother. (Probably me. My brother was usually The Good Kid, at least until I left home.) I had noticed that he grew increasingly avoidant over time, spending more and more time at work or on business trips, and I believed at the time (and later had confirmed) that this was because he didn't want to be at home. Didn't want to be around her.

Not much of a protection, eh?

But yet.

My brother and I used Dad as terrain for driving Matchbox cars. Much more interesting than the floor, terrain with curves.

He read to us. To me, just about every night he was home between when I was five and fourteen or so, and after that I would drop in when he read to my brother. Every 21st of December, it was cracking open the Dickens and, "Marley was dead, to begin with" ... and he's been known to call me on the 21st of December to wish me a happy wedding anniversary and to read me Dickens. (I'm considering calling him this year to read to him, actually.)

He taught me to love learning. I would come to him with my math homework and say, "Dad, I don't understand this," and he would sketch it out on long yellow pads with thin blue lines in his near-illegible scribbling, explaining with enthusiasm, with utter joy, and then, "And here's what you can do with that!" and off into a tangent, a bit of exciting new mathematics, a little physics, something to show the way of manipulating the abstracts simply for the joy of playing with it.

I went to a psychologist for a number of years, junior high and early high school, and we would have dinner every week, just going to the McDonalds near the shrink, but grabbing our burgers and fries and sitting and talking. About all kinds of things. Is it halachically acceptable to unscrew an Oreo on the sabbath? This is the silliness at the Pentagon this week. This is this fascinating bit of Pelagius. This is the poet I should read. When I stopped going to the psychtype, I was sad to lose the dinners and afraid to ask -- partly because I was afraid Mom would get jealous -- and we started to meet up at a bookstore about two miles from my high school and go to the Roy Rogers every week instead, just to keep the rhythms of it going.

By the end of high school, he drove me to school almost every day, just so we'd have space to talk and spend together. (I didn't go to my local high school, or I'd have been biking it.) I'd get there barely after they unlocked the doors sometimes, go up into the hall where my locker was, and nap until my friends arrived.

Once, when I was frustrated with the pre-divorce tension when I was home from college for some vacation or other, I posted on my bedroom door all the words to Billy Joel's "Code of Silence". He took them down and left them on my bed, and said, quietly, that he was afraid of how my mother would react. I knew he knew; I knew he was afraid. I decided not to put them back up, half because he reminded me to be afraid, half because I didn't want to scare him more.

Having Dad didn't give me a mother who was sane, but ... I was reading through UTBM today, recognising bits of myself in some of the traits of some of the types, the generational damage of being raised by a borderline. And while he was distant quite often, and not directly protective of me, I still grew up knowing that I was loved, and supported, and that someone understood that sometimes the world was mad. And so it's only a few things, here and there; I can see the ways these things are not me, as well. The ways I have tendencies that I am able to overcome.

I learned how to nurture from my father, as the bone-deep, steady current of a voice reading even if today it's a little hoarse, because it matters as much to be there and offer it as it did to know the steady metronome of loving support, day after day, as something that could be trusted.

The Power of Weird

I have occasionally been known to comment that humor is guerilla thought. It gets in under the armour, provokes this involuntary twitch, and then sits there to be thought about. It's one of the reasons I love reading Terry Pratchett now that he's learned to write, and can't currently reread Jingo.

Anyway, that being said:

Clowns successfully rout KKK rally. (Trigger warning, article contains apostrophe abuse.)

Discordianism at its best and most succesfful, warping minds in productive directions.

Hail Eris, man.

A Beauty Myth

Once upon a when ...

The Mother's mirror is the black arc of space, sparkling with infinity, full of starlight. It is the Abyss that looks back into you, the reflection of all that was, is, will be; all of potential, all of creation.

The Peacock found His Mother's mirror and looked into it, looked deep. His voice rang out with pride, "Look how beautiful I am!" and he shook His tail, rattling the seven heavens with His thunder. He saw Himself, the fullness of what that means, and was proud; in his pride, He was strong; in his strength He could make all the worlds tremble.


And who is the Peacock?

Some call Him Melek Ta'us, the Angel of Evil who was flung bodily from heaven by the Angel of Good and abandoned to die on the rocks where He landed -- save that a Yezidi shepherd cared for Him and received His blessing. Some call him Adversary and Saviour embodied in one, the bird and serpent twined together so none can tell one from the other. When the Twins, who are identically born and exactly different, lovers locked in eternal warfare one with the other, dissolve in each other in ecstasy, their two candleflames a single light burning on twin wicks, there is the Peacock. If the Twins are thesis and antithesis, He is synthesis, the union and transcendence of what has gone before.

His Pride could rend worlds, shatter souls; yet, when He is aligned and true, as the Feri saying goes, resting beneath the hand of the Mother, He is tempered with Law. There is no Hell left to burn, for His tears of compassion put out its flames long ago. His is strife and salvation; His utmost test is this:

Look into my Mother's mirror, our Mother's mirror.

Face who you are. In all your wholeness. All the terrible beautiful completeness of yourself.

Shake. Your. Tail.

The Things I Never Saw

So, as part of my trying to work my way through that godawful shock from last week, I tracked down my copy of Christine Ann Lawson's Understanding the Borderline Mother. I will probably write about this on and off for rather a while.

I read this book several years ago, and it was this fascinating thing, and now I'm rereading it familiar with the basic material and getting hit with things in context. And the first thing that snagged me was:

When desperation drives behavior such as lying or stealing, they feel innocent of wrongdoing and do not feel guilt or remorse. Apologies are rare, therefore, and borderlines may be confused about why others expect them to feel remorse.

(Understanding the Borderline Mother, page 10.)

I cannot remember her ever apologising, ever expressing regret, ever even seeming sad about the necessity of something she had done that had had negative consequences (intended or otherwise).

I'm twenty-nine years old.

Last night was the first time I ever really noticed that I lived in a world in which Mother Does Not Do Apology. It was so far down in the axiom, so far down in what was normal, what was expected, what was the way the world worked, that I had this specific exception in my expectations for how people interacted with each other.

Normality is such a fluid thing, so defined by what is seen -- by what can be seen. And I couldn't have seen that without the outside perspective of reading the book, knowing some of this stuff and being able to say, "You know, that piece ... it fits there."

What can I see?

What can't I see?

Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations

One of the useful things about looking at the world on a slant is that I have no shortage of reminders that other people are not me. Though it's often a little bit disconcerting, because there's this sort of chasm of comprehension sitting there and I have no idea how to start bridging it.

I've been thinking about writing about this one for months; the comments that provoked the original thought are nowhere near current. But anyway.

One of the things that hits me really hard with the "Other people are different from you" cluestick are comments like, "Really, do monogamy because I'm lazy. Anything else is far too complicated."

Monogamy is way too complicated and confusing for me.

You see, I like knowing why things work. I have a hard time operating in systems I don't comprehend, because I am, for a variety of reasons, quite sure I'll wind up stumbling across some case of Breaking The Rules when I didn't pick up on an implication or an unspoken ... thingy, and trying to do that makes me awfully anxious and self-conscious, and I'm way too good at anxiety, self-abuse, and social fuckup to want to choose to do that sort of thing all on its own.

"I'm in a monogamous relationship because I'm not attracted to anyone other than my partner" makes sense to me. It makes no sense to have relationships without, y'know, wanting them. (And it would be hypocritical of me -- someone who hits a point where I just don't want any more relationships -- to dismiss someone who hits that point at 'one' rather than 'two'.) "I'm in a monogamous relationship because I choose to offer that to my partner" more or less makes sense to me. There's stuff that makes sense to me, for various levels of making sense.

But "too complicated" just throws me for a loop.

You know what's complicated, to me? Figuring out these little social boundaries of what is and is not supposed to be an appropriate interaction. I once accidentally hurt my best friend in high school quite badly by napping with my head in his lap on the way home from a concert, which he took as having romantic inclinations. But my social group in high school wound up evolving into the sort of strange organism which would, at parties, wind up lying in a great heap of people in the living room floor staring at the ceiling fan, listening to Erasure, and occasionally saying, "Uh, whose hand is this?" -- without the influence of any drugs whatsoever except perhaps pizza. There's this fellow I had this awfully confusing unrelationship with who wound up dying in my lap during the game of Paranoia in which we met, because I was giving him a backrub. (The friend-of-friend who'd brought him said, "I thought you two might hit it off.") The folks I spend time with these days are a fairly hug-and-snuggle crowd, and many of our gatherings are in a sort of clothing-fluid household. (Mostly taken advantage of by the owners of the space and by me and my horrible tolerance for heat.)

I don't understand what's supposed to be okay and what's not, under the principles of surrounding monogamy. I know of people who would be horrified by the sort of stuff I consider normal interaction, wouldn't have a relationship with someone who did that.

I hear people going on about "emotional infidelity", and who want to police vigorously against the possibility that someone might have a friendship with a person of the other sex (somehow, I never see this translated for same-sex couples), with vast quantities of "Of course I broke up with my [sex-of-spouse] friends when I married [spouse]" and "We only socialise as a couple". And mostly this just hits all of my "Warning signs for abusers: controlling friendships" buttonisation. (I know this isn't a universal monogamy thing, but it's one of the things that baffles me.)

And then sometimes I get specifics: this set of things is okay to do with someone else, this set of things is not okay. And ... I can't figure out why one thing goes in one list and not the other. I mean, I get emotionally irrational reasons -- I don't fancy the concept of anyone other than my husband trimming my split ends at all -- but these lists are often presented to me as being Obvious. A lot of "Of course one doesn't ..." and I don't ever see a why. And this is where I start getting paranoid, trying to figure out what The Rules for operating this way are, trying to figure out what the principles are, because otherwise the entire territory is this sort of teeter-totter of Unspeakable Consequences. The closest I get is "Don't do something that threatens the security of the relationship", which, okay, yes, I can go for that, but then I get stalled out on "What will threaten the security of the relationship?" and I don't know the rules. Some people say that the boundary is at sex, and I don't understand what differentiates sex from anything else; some people say that the boundary is at certain levels of emotional engagement, and I don't understand what differentiates the 'not-okay' emotions from the 'okay' emotions; some people say things about encouraging or discouraging the emotional stuff that goes off in directions where I don't understand why that sort of effort is worth expending.

I mean, I can start with what threatens me: not having a secure place in the relationship, or having my place in the relationship undermined by lack of time, space, and consideration. Okay, then. But that doesn't say anything about anyone else; it's, to put it in crass terms, "Are my needs being met here, or am I being told my needs will be met by someone who is not doing so?" But this doesn't get me any closer to understanding, because an exclusive relationship does not provide me with time, space, or consideration. I mean, I recognise that there's a cultural symbol-set there, but it's like the symbol-set of Catholicism to me -- I see it, I can translate it roughly, but none of that brings me salvation, or an understanding of why 'salvation' is something I should be pursuing. There's some impressive art, though.

The thing about the invisible boundary between friends and lovers is that it's invisible. And trying to navigate what's okay around there is too complicated for me. I much rather let relationships settle where they're quiet and stable and don't take too much work and self-conscious staring at figuring out what's okay.

And, y'know, I've had six lovers in my life, plus some groping. I'm terribly boring that way. And I want a boring, quiet, domestic sort of life, without the drama of new relationships or turmoil or change. That sort of thing I understand. I just can't correlate it in my head with monogamy, because monogamy is too weird and risky to be satisfyingly dull.

Living in Theory

(This has been kicking around in my head since the beginning of the month, so is not directly related to the current dwama that some fraction of my eleven and a half readers are aware of. Nonetheless ... same old, same old.)

There's a one-liner that drifts around talking about the Land of Theory. "I'd like to live in Theory. Everything works there."

There's also "The difference between theory and practice is that in Theory, there is no difference."

A while back, on one of those link-chasing festivals, I wound up reading the recent posts of one of the Big Feminist Blogs, and the comment threads on them. And aside from folks I knew, what I read mostly ... was something I could link to and say, "This conversation is pretty much distilled essence of why I don't call myself a feminist". If I wanted to invite the sort of response that I'm still pretty sure I'd risk even after waiting the two, two and a half weeks after it went off the front page of a busy blog.

This is hard to write about, trying to pull out the assumptions and the things I react badly to. Because, yeah, I can go through and pull out bits -- in one of the drafts of this I did -- like 'Men who fail to hate you are rare' -- but the more of them I pull out the more likely it is that the ravening hordes will come in and how-dare-you at me. And one of the reasons I dropped the word from my identity was that I hated the internalised warfare it brought to me. The occasional bickering about why-don't-you-call-yourself-a is still warfare, even if it's outside my head, even if it's someone else attempting to impose on me an obligation to adopt a label that doesn't like my kind. And if I'd gone into that thread to post, I'm pretty damn sure that I'd have been assumed to be a man, because apparently penis-possession leads to the sort of blindness that's a part of where my head is at. According to what I read, at least.

It just ... I'm honestly afraid to write about this. I've seen the way the harpies come in onto people. It reminds me of some of the first feminists I 'met', who were big believers in the 'men can't be feminists, and any man who disagreed is blinded by his privilege', who so graciously insulted a transman I know by saying that he wasn't a real enough man to be thrown out of their club. (He pointed out that he'd been raised to be a good little feminist daughter by a mother who was in their club, and her reaction to his transition told him all he needed to know.) And at the same time, I rail about it, I resent this sense that this supposed community that's supposed to be supporting me because I happen to have been born with a woman's body is both so shockingly alien to me and is willing to express such venom to people whose experiences are much more like mine. I'm reminded of how someone who spoke up about one of that crowd got a sneering, "Well, I feel silenced" from one of them, never mind that he (and, for that matter, she in response) had the guts to actually speak up against her bullshit and I run off to my little semi-anonymous space on Blogger and angst about whether I dare speak up.

I saw a later thread on the blog that was actually within one of my realms of reasonable expertise, another link-chasing experience, and I considered offering some of my thoughts ... and didn't. Because ... I know that that space isn't my community, and is unlikely to ever be so. Inviting being noticed that way is ... not ... safe.

My ex read the thread and said (quoted with permission), "You know, it occurs to me that I _don't_ want to live in theory. Sure, everything actually works there, but the men are all really pretty horrible people."