What I Want To Trace

In 2010, my father and his siblings discovered Ancestry.com, that website that allows a person to search birth, marriage, military, census, and death records to construct a family tree.

And because an Ancestry.com tree becomes more accurate as users add more relationships to it, my father and my uncle and my aunts sent me, my sister, and my cousins email invitations to add our own families to the growing tree.

I opened the tree and studied it with growing resentment. According to Ancestry.com, I was a divorced single mother of one daughter, but that did not describe my actual life at all. My daughter was adopted from Ethiopia, with a family tree all her own, difficult (or impossible) to trace because her biological parents’ births had not been recorded in any official way. And I was not technically a single mother, since I lived with Ali, my partner of three years, and her two children.

I opened the tree and studied it with growing resentment.

With a few swift clicks, I added Ali to the tree as my spouse, though same-sex marriage was not legal in Alaska at the time, and Ali had never been interested in marriage, anyway. Another click: I added Ali’s two biological children. With my divorce branching off in one direction and Ali branching off in another, I tangled the neat lines of the Hahn family tree.

When Ali died a year later, I did not have the heart to update the Ancestry.com tree. I barely had the heart to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Then, this past June, the Vikings led me back to Ancestry.com. In June, I learned at the Oslo Viking Ship Museum that one of the Vikings’ major trading settlements, Hedeby, was located in today’s Schleswig-Holstein, a state in northern Germany from which half of my ancestors (all of my father’s side) emigrated in the mid-1800s. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know why the sight of the Oseberg ship jolted some familiarity in me (is that why I’m so drawn to spirals?). When I started asking these questions, my uncle Jim, our family archivist, sent me a DNA kit from Ancestry.com, and, out of curiosity, I logged in to the website again.

A family tree hides as much as it reveals. I “cleaned up” my part of the Hahn family tree by deleting the fake marriage to Ali and adding the real, legal marriage to Meredith. I added Mitike’s legal adoption by me in 2008 and her adoption by Meredith last December, and I added the names of Mitike’s birth parents. I traced Meredith’s family awhile, out of curiosity, discovering that one ancestral line zigzags all the way back to the 1500s in Alsace, France. Then I studied our section of the tree, noticing how our marriage is an end to our two lines in our families, how the appearance of Mitike as the daughter of two mothers could confuse someone who failed to notice the adoption records. How disconcerting, the reduction of entire human lives to small rectangles that contain only a first, middle, and last name, a birthdate, and a death date.

How disconcerting, the reduction of entire human lives to small rectangles that contain only a first, middle, and last name, a birthdate, and a death date.

What does that branching tree explain about me, about Meredith, about Mitike? What does it reveal about Rachel Banta, my grandmother’s great-great grandmother, who was born in 1780 in Pennsylvania? What does it hide about my wife’s grandmother’s great-great grandmother Charity Brewer, who was born in 1805 in North Carolina? How much does it refuse to explain about Mitike’s ancestors, who weathered a struggle between Muslim settlers and Ethiopian Christians in the early 1800s, and who witnessed battles between feudal kings?I am still dissatisfied with the story Ancestry.com tells, but I appreciate now that it is one place to begin.

Lesbian historians like Lillian Faderman (especially in Surpassing the Love of Men, 1981; and To Believe in Women, 1999) have argued that lesbians must discover and build their own sense of heritage. That means that Patience and Sarah, that wonderful straightforward 1969 book by Alma Routsong about a lesbian pioneer couple, is as much a description of my ancestry as my genetic map is. That means that discerning the truth of historical relationships — Susan B. and Anna D., Virginia and Vita, Eleanor and Lorena — is as crucial to understanding who I am as the 1847 passenger list of the ship that carried my ancestors Wulff and Gretje from Hamburg to New Orleans.

Lesbian historians like Lillian Faderman… have argued that lesbians must discover and build their own sense of heritage. That means that Patience and Sarah, that wonderful straightforward 1969 book by Alma Routsong about a lesbian pioneer couple, is as much a description of my ancestry as my genetic map is.

On Ancestry.com, the self is the first rectangle. Click the green plus sign, add a relationship. Connect. Add another relationship. Intertwine. The lines seem to tangle, but they barely whisper the outlines of deeply complex stories.

This summer, I began creating a new book — part trail guide, part history — on the 60+ Colorado peaks and lakes named after women. I’m calling it “Remember More Than Their Names,” and I’m blogging about my hiking and research discoveries at http://remembermorethantheirnames.blogspot.com/. I think of these historical women as my ancestors, too, though we only have our gender and Colorado in common. Determining the identity of each woman has been surprisingly difficult, since maps have traditionally used only the first name of a woman honored. Again and again, it has been Ancestry.com that has given me the outline of the story. Then it is up to me, the storyteller, to fill in the rest. For example, Ancestry.com told me that Helen Rich of Breckenridge, the namesake for Mount Helen, died a single woman with no children, but local records and her own papers reveal that she lived for decades with the poet Belle Turnbull. In Turnbull’s poetry, I found reference to forbidden passion, to domestic bliss. And the two women are buried together. Another piece of the heritage told.

I know the danger of looking backwards too long. I know that it is as important that I live my life now, in 2017 Colorado, as it is for me to discover and tell the stories of these women who lived in the past. But I believe I can learn to make of my life something deeper if I can pull these stories from the shadows. This other way of tracing and building heritage matters as much as the genetic map of my bloodline.

This other way of tracing and building heritage matters as much as the genetic map of my bloodline.

When I stood gazing at the Oseberg ship in Oslo’s Viking Ship Museum in June, my blood thrummed with the familiarity of the curves of the ship, the intricate carvings, the spiral on the prow. I touched the silver spiral I wear at the base of my neck, and I leaned closer to my wife and my daughter. What did I recognize? Maybe Ancestry.com would deny a genetic connection between me and the two women — one 25–30, one 50–55 — who were buried together, in state, in the Oseberg ship in 834 CE, but I am certain they are part of my heritage, too, if only because they were women. Maybe the elder was a queen (some have suggested she was Queen Åsa of the sagas) and the younger was a sacrifice. Maybe the elder was a völva, a seer, a holy woman, and the younger was her lover or her apprentice or both.

We will never know. But with each fragment we find, we discover ourselves more deeply. The mystery is my heritage. The seeking is what I want to trace.

top photo by Mr Cup / Fabien Barral on Unsplash

RESIST

On November 9, early in the morning, I researched emigration to Canada.

I explored whether Canada needs experienced psychologists like my wife (it does) and whether I could get a teaching license there (I could) and whether we could find an Ethiopian community for Mitike there (yes: Toronto).

But I was wrong to try to flee Trump’s America.

Two and a half months later, I know that my responsibility as a woman, as an educated person who grew up in relative privilege, as a teacher in a large city high school that serves a refugee population, as a writer, as a mother, and as an American is not to flee this country but to stay and join the resistance.

I was wrong to try to flee Trump’s America.Two and a half months later, I know that my responsibility … is not to flee this country but to stay and join the resistance.

I must stay to resist because, as a reader and as a student of history, I recognize the symptoms of this time. Suddenly, the words of George Orwell’s dystopic fiction 1984 (written in 1949) and Hannah Arendt’s analysis The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) speak directly about today’s America; suddenly the brave civilian resistance portrayed in books like Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies or Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, or in movies like Schindler’s List(1993) or Hidden Figures (2016) is pertinent to what we need to do now, in America, in 2017.

We must resist. In every way. Immediately.

I hear the alarm bells ringing in every cabinet choice (DeVos, Sessions, Tillerson), in every incendiary phrase in an official speech (“American carnage”), in every moment KellyAnn Conway or Sean Spicer defends “alternative facts” with their doublespeak, in every insecure and unbalanced tweet, in the deleted subheadings from whitehouse.gov, in the reports that government agencies like the EPA have been instructed not to communicate with the public, in every new executive order that threatens human rights. If we do not speak loudly and act swiftly now, our government will go the way of certain other governments in history.

We must resist. In every way. Immediately.

On Saturday, January 21, I pulled on my handmade crocheted pink pussy hat and marched beside my wife and daughter in Denver. We joined over 150,000 other people. Those of us in pink hats grinned at each other, connected. Meredith and I marched holding hands, our daughter leaning close, reading the protest signs to us: “Forward, not backward!” and “No racism, no homophobia, no xenophobia, no Islamophobia” and “Women’s rights are human rights” and “My pussy has TEETH!” and “Nasty women make history” and “LOVE WINS!” and “I’m with her and her and her and her and her!” In Civic Center Park, we cheered for spoken-word poets and singers and leaders and activists, and hope swelled in the air. My mom and I (both in our pink hats) wrapped our arms around each other’s waists as a woman law-maker asked the crowd to shout out the names of women who have inspired us. I shouted Mom’s name; she shouted Gram’s. The atmosphere was inclusive, optimistic, activated, even cheerful. On the way home on the train, I vibrated with the good energy of it all, glowing to think that, though I had marched in Denver, I had marched alongside my friends in Chicago and St. Paul and Portland and San Francisco and D.C. and Des Moines and Juneau and Tucson, and alongside the over one million other people who had marched that day.

The Women’s March was not officially a march against Trump. But in these first days of his presidency, we are all realizing that our resistance must be against him and his government, that in fact, the most American, most constitutional, most patriotic reaction to Trump’s election is to resist it.

Critics kept asking why we were marching, but they only had to read our signs: we marched to insist that we will fight for the rights of all people, for goodness and decency, for a world that is not built on greed or power, but on a deep belief in humanity’s capability for love and progress. The Women’s March was not officially a march against Trump. But in these first days of his presidency, we are all realizing that our resistance must be against him and his government, that in fact, the most American, most constitutional, most patriotic reaction to Trump’s election is to resist it. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, No. 28, in 1787, “If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government.” Resistance is the only way we will keep our freedoms in this country. It is the only way we will keep our country.

Many of those who voted for Trump believe he is the resistance, the wrecking ball come to destroy the government that has failed to support them and failed to improve their lives. … And this, of course, is another symptom of the serious peril in which we find ourselves.

Many of those who voted for Trump believe he is the resistance, the wrecking ball come to destroy the government that has failed to support them and failed to improve their lives. They shake their heads at our protests; they tell us to accept Trump’s win and move forward; they claim we liberals just can’t handle the “locker room talk” or Trump’s willingness to ignore political correctness. And this, of course, is another symptom of the serious peril in which we find ourselves. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her preface to The Rise of Totalitarianism, “It is as though mankind has divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.” In other words, if those who believe they are omnipotent can convince the ones who feel powerless that they speak for them, too (though they do not intend to), then they will achieve ultimate power at any cost. Hitler did that with great success for some time. Now Trump, the millionaire businessman, is claiming to his poverty-stricken supporters in West Virginia and Michigan that they are the “forgotten people” and that he is their “messenger” — and when he speaks, they cheer wildly, praising God.

If those who believe they are omnipotent can convince the ones who feel powerless that they speak for them, too (though they do not intend to), then they will achieve ultimate power at any cost.

And that is why marching on one day — even with millions — is not enough. The resistance against Trump’s corporate coup d’etat must be vigilant, constant, aggressive, and committed. We must not put our signs away. We must keep ourselves informed of every executive orderand every bill proposed in Congress. We must write our legislators emails and letters, we must call them until they recognize our voices, we must create and sign petitions, we must organize groups in person so we can keep each other aware (look into registering an Indivisible Group; a group of people and I are meeting to do just that on Monday), we must contribute money to independent media (I support The Guardian, The New Yorker, and Democracy Now!), we must keep yelling the truth when the “alternative facts” are presented, and we must vote and vote and vote in every local and regional election. If we can, we must remain vocal about the issues that matter to us most, even if others pressure us or order us to be quiet.

There are many ways to resist. There are those ways of American democracy that I have just mentioned, and there are other ways that we must learn so we can use them if we need to.

There are many ways to resist. There are those ways of American democracy that I have just mentioned, and there are other ways that we must learn so we can use them if we need to. We must listen to the lessons of Europe’s recent history with fascism, which Yale history professor and Holocaust scholar Timothy Snyder summarizes succinctly in the twenty action steps he presents in his essay “What you — yes, you — can do to save America from tyranny.” As Snyder recommends, we must read as much as we can (especially the longer, in-depth analyses and books, as sound-bites are dangerous in any time). We should re-read Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”; we should re-read the history of India’s and South Africa’s resistance movements; we should re-read Dr. King’s words in “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” And if we read books and watch movies about resistance in history and in fiction, we will learn those other ways to resist — the kinds of aggressive, powerful nonviolent resistance that are not as familiar to those of us who have lived relatively comfortable lives so far.

What will I be prepared to do? … Could I shout “TWO PLUS TWO IS FOUR!” even though the authorities tell me I must say five or be tortured, as they told Winston in 1984? … Could I stand strong with others although pipeline construction equipment or tanks roll toward us?  I think I could. I hope so.

I’m researching in this way so I can be ready if I need to be. What will I be prepared to do? Could I run secret subversive messages, like the French characters in All the Light We Cannot See? Could I shout “TWO PLUS TWO IS FOUR!” even though the authorities tell me I must say five or be tortured, as they told Winston in 1984? Could I speak publicly against oppression, as the women in Hidden Figures did? Could I smuggle threatened people (like my Muslim students, like my students whose parents are undocumented or who are themselves undocumented) in and out of my own house, as so many people did in Europe during World War II? Could I write and speak and organize, even against threats, like the women in In the Time of the Butterflies did? Could I stand strong with others although pipeline construction equipment or tanks roll toward us?

I think I could. I hope so.

These days and weeks and months ahead will test me, as they will test us all. But what I’m learning from my research is this: years from now, history will ask how people responded to Trump and his plans for America, and I will say that I stayed.

I will say that I resisted.

top photo by Melany Rochester on Unsplash

Note to Self

I decide to travel back in time and space to my farm in eastern Iowa, to warn my eighteen-year-old self that she’s a lesbian.

I figure this information will save her quite a bit of pain and difficulty in her life, which has become my life, and I’m interested in a more unsullied path to where I am right now.  So I go.  It’s 1995, and my self — a senior in high school — is sitting at the round kitchen table working on her calculus homework.  I stand in the doorway for a moment, watching her.  She looks serious, her brow furrowed.  Beside her, a glass of milk and a small bowl of raw cookie dough (she wasn’t very health-conscious then).  She’s still wearing her shorts and bright red t-shirt from track practice, and her wisps of dark hair have escaped from her ponytail.  She’s chewing the end of her pencil.

“Hey, Sarah,” I say from the doorway.

She starts, and nearly falls out of her chair.  It’s midnight; she thought she was alone in the kitchen.  She doesn’t recognize me.  Why would she?  I’ve got gray hair and wrinkles at the corners of my eyes; I’m thinner than she is, since I’ve lost all the muscle tone I developed in West High School’s weight room.

“Who are you?”

Her worst problems are that she’s still got an hour of homework before she can go to bed, and that her lower back aches from the track meet.  I think about telling her, Just wait until you find out how much your back hurts when you’re 39, but I have more important things to say.

She doesn’t sound afraid.  My current self would sound terrified if a stranger showed up unannounced at night in my kitchen.  I’ve become afraid of everything, but this Sarah is brave.  Afterall, nothing has befallen her yet.  Her worst problems are that she’s still got an hour of homework before she can go to bed, and that her lower back aches from the track meet.  I think about telling her, Just wait until you find out how much your back hurts when you’re 39, but I have more important things to say.

“I came to talk to you.”

She glances anxiously at the calculus.

“Don’t take that so seriously,” I say.  “You’re going to become an English teacher.”

She laughs.  “No.  I’m majoring in math.”

Oh, this phase.  When I thought I would become an engineer, just because everyone (and my grades) had told me I was good at math.  I didn’t even know, really, what an engineer did.

Oh, this phase.  When I thought I would become an engineer, just because everyone (and my grades) had told me I was good at math.  I didn’t even know, really, what an engineer did.

“Fine.  Look, Sarah.  You’re gay.”

“What?” She flushes, frowning at me.  “Who are you?”

“Just hear me out.  You’re gay — you know, a lesbian?  Like Kayla on the newspaper staff?  Like Tig on your basketball team?  You like girls.  When you’re 28, you’re going to realize this, but you’ll already be married to a man, and –”

“– to Jake?”  She looks so hopeful I want to hit her over the head with her calculus textbook.  Jake?  She’s going to break up with that high school boyfriend only weeks into her first year of college.

“No, not Jake.  But it doesn’t matter.  Look.  You’re a lesbian, and you’re going to realize this — or, I mean, I — and I’m you — didn’t realize it until I was already married to a man, and I wish I’d known earlier.  I’m 39 now, and I’m marrying a woman next month, and –”

“You’re what?”

Ah.  It’s 1995.  Ellen Degeneres didn’t come out until 1997, and the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage was the Netherlands, in 2001.  In eastern Iowa, my eighteen-year-old self has only ever heard whispered rumors about lesbians, and the whispers are never kind. 

Ah.  It’s 1995.  Ellen Degeneres didn’t come out until 1997, and the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage was the Netherlands, in 2001.  In eastern Iowa, my eighteen-year-old self has only ever heard whispered rumors about lesbians, and the whispers are never kind.  Kayla on the newspaper staff, Tig on the basketball team — they were outcasts, destined never to be popular; they were odd.  Queer.

“In 2016, gay marriage is legal everywhere in the United States.”

Her eyes widen.  “You’re crazy.”  She glances to her left, at the magnet that holds the knives above the sink.  The magnet that only works periodically, so the knives have fallen and nicked the white countertop.

Carefully, she rises and begins edging toward the foot of the stairs.  She glances up to where her parents — my parents — are upstairs, sleeping.

“I’ll go.  I just want you to open your eyes.  And don’t date the guy you meet at camp next summer — he’s unbalanced.  And maybe you should reconsider your college choice?  Go to Smith or Bryn Mawr, instead?”

She’s clinging to the doorframe by the stairs, one hand on the blue glass cookie jar, which is filled with Oreos.  I don’t remember my mom ever filling it with Oreos, but there it is.  “I –”  She swallows, touching her throat.  Emotion always gets stuck, a lump, in my throat.  “I don’t understand.”  Then:  “I’m not like Kayla or Tig.”

“But you are.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know.”  She doesn’t.  She’s never read any book or seen any movie with a lesbian character.  She’s never had a lesbian friend.  She’s never walked in a neighborhood where men hold hands or women kiss each other openly.  She’s been taught in church that marriage is between a man and a woman, and no one has ever mentioned homosexuality.  She’s never thought about it.  But in twenty-one years and one month, she’s going to walk down an aisle and marry a woman.  Legally.  It will be legal in Colorado, where she will get married, but it will also be legal in Iowa, in Mississippi, in New York, in California.  In countries all across the world.  And she will marry a woman in the presence of her supportive family and that woman’s supportive family, and all their supportive friends.  After, they will wrap their arms around their daughter, who is adopted from Ethiopia, and everyone will clap and cheer.

Nothing has happened to her yet.  She is unmarked by loss or grief, by disappointment or anger… but she doesn’t know the pain that is ahead of her.

“I don’t understand,” she says again.  She begins to cry.  Nothing has happened to her yet.  She is unmarked by loss or grief, by disappointment or anger.  Sometimes, she is hard on herself when she doesn’t get a top grade in her physics class or when she misses too many free throws in a basketball game, but she doesn’t know the pain that is ahead of her.  I don’t want to tell her.  I don’t want her to know about her parents’ divorce, about her own divorce from the good man she will marry when she still doesn’t know she is gay, about the sudden illness and death of the first woman she will love.

And suddenly, I want her to be this innocent a little longer.

I want her to finish her calculus and go to bed, and dream of hiking Long’s Peak, which she plans to attempt again this summer with her dad.  When she wakes up, I want her to drive to school and kiss her boyfriend and rush to her AP English class, which she loves most, though she has never considered majoring in that subject.

“Sarah,” I tell her, my voice gentle.  “Tomorrow, you’ll think you dreamed this.”  And without looking at her again, I walk to the front door and pull it open.  I step out onto the deck my dad built, and I walk down the stairs and out along the sidewalk to the long gravel driveway.  Here, beyond the cover of the two great maple trees, the night sky is vast.  The crickets have already begun to make their music.  Above me, the Milky Way scatters its protective blanket.

I am all that I have become and am becoming.  And it all happens exactly when it should.

I close my eyes, and when I open them again, I stand on my front porch beneath the stars in Colorado, and I understand:  if I’d traveled an easier route to this moment, I wouldn’t get to stand in this moment at all.  I get to marry Meredith in a month because my 18-year-old self became this exact 39-year-old with silvering hair and scars.  And every evening, when Meredith and Mitike and I hold hands in blessing at our dinner table — the same round wooden table where I did my homework all those years ago — I am amazed at all I never imagined.  And that’s the point:  I am all that I have become and am becoming.  And it all happens exactly when it should.

top photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Just Like Any Other Couple

“Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there. It offers the hope of companionship and understanding and assurance that while both still live there will be someone to care for the other.”

— Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, June 26, 2015

Getting married is not as easy as living alone. When you live alone, no one cares if you leave the dishes in the sink for days or forget to put your shoes away or neglect to maintenance the car. When you live alone, you can come home from teaching and only eat a tortilla with peanut butter for dinner, and then write semi-bad fiction for hours before you binge-watch several episodes of “Orange is the New Black” and then come to bed in a clatter of noise and light. When you live alone, you can let all the negative emotions simmer for days in your body until you develop pneumonia, exhausted.

When you live alone, you can tell yourself, “This is better. This is easier. I don’t have to negotiate with anyone. I’m just fine by myself. This is evidence that I am a strong woman.”

And in the middle of the night, when you wake from a nightmare, and the dark room looms over you, and you turn on all the lights, a lump in your throat, you can comfort yourself, because that is the only other person in the room.

When you live alone, you tell yourself, Don’t accountants say getting married doesn’t make good financial sense? And anyway, haven’t you tried marriage already? You failed, remember? Yes, he was a man, and you realized you were gay, but still, you failed.

When you live alone, you tell yourself, Don’t accountants say getting married doesn’t make good financial sense? And anyway, haven’t you tried marriage already? You failed, remember? Yes, he was a man, and you realized you were gay, but still, you failed.

And when you finally meet a woman, and your body and your soul pulls you toward making a life with her, you shrink, afraid. Why do it? Why get married? Why stand in front of your family and friends and look this woman in her brown-ringed-with-gold eyes and say, “I promise,” and “I do”, and “I will love you the best I can for my life”?

It doesn’t make logical sense, right? Sometimes, it will be very hard. Sometimes, it will be unpredictable. Sometimes, you’ll stand in your kitchen and look at her and feel infuriated by something she’s said or not done. Sometimes, she’ll look at you with disappointment or with irritation. Your life together will be unpredictable. You might lose her. Actually, you will lose her. Someday in the future, one of you will have to look at the other one fading away, her white hair spread like rays on a pillow.

Why leap into such pain?

This morning, I woke to Meredith’s soft cheek against mine, her arms around me. I still floated in my dream, but when I murmured something incomprehensible, she pulled me closer and said she loved me. In one week, we get to marry each other, she murmured into my hair, and smiling, I opened my eyes and kissed her.

I used to insist I preferred living alone. Even for months after I met Meredith, after we began to spend hours together, and never ran out of words to say, and found that no amount of time was enough, I insisted — to her — that I didn’t want marriage. Better to have good friends. It’s so much less of a risk. Anyway, why were LGBT people fighting to get into the institutions of marriage and the military? Isn’t it better to create our own ways of being, to live happily alone and then sometimes come together to kiss and spend some hours?

Meredith was patient. She held me carefully then as she does now. She never articulated arguments for marriage (though she thought them), but instead cooked beside me, camped with me and Mitike, watched movies with me, talked with me into the small hours. And then all of a sudden, I understood that I wanted to share all my days with her. I don’t know when this happened, but I think it was probably an ordinary moment (Emerson: “The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common”). I think maybe Meredith was slicing red cabbage for coleslaw or she was scratching our dog behind his ears or she was laughing about something I had just said or she was listening carefully to Mitike or she was gazing off into space with her fingertips resting on her eyebrow as she does when she’s thinking. It wasn’t a moment of angel trumpets and bright neon lights. It was just a moment in what had already become our shared lives together, though we still lived at different addresses. And it hurt because I understood, in a flash: even when it’s hard, I want to live beside this woman. Even when she’s sick. Even when we’re irritated with each other. Even when I’m exhausted and I can’t be soft and kind. Even when we don’t know what the next day will hold. Because this hard work of companionship is richer and more what life intends for us than being alone.

If I’d read those words when I was single, I would have felt angry resentment. How dare anyone talk about how the universe intends us to live and learn in relationship, when it’s not an option for some of us, or when some of us tried and then lost it? And I would have been right, just as I am right to say: here in my current life is you, and I choose you to be my wife, to be no other than yourself, to love what I know of you and to trust what I do not yet know, to support you in becoming the person you want to be, to nurture my faith in your abiding love through all our years, and in all that life may bring us.

Marriage is serious, and though it doesn’t make people’s lives easier, it does make them richer.

Last June, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority 5-4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were.” Marriage is serious, and though it doesn’t make people’s lives easier, it does make them richer. This June, Meredith and I will choose to become more than two individual women, but a couple, committed to struggle with and rejoice in this life together. Because it’s harder. Because it’s ultimately lovelier to walk through this life hand in hand with someone you cherish and who cherishes you.

When I started my column this month, I intended to write about the one-year anniversary of that Supreme Court decision. I wrote several drafts in which I discussed the dissenters’ opinions, and then lauded Kennedy’s statements. In one draft, I wrote my own experience against the backdrop of those conflicting opinions, explaining that it’s still difficult to be a lesbian even in a nation that allows me to legally marry my wife. But none of those drafts felt right, and I didn’t understand why, until Meredith — my best editor — said quietly, “Why don’t you write about how we’re just like any other couple, gay or straight? We’re a regular couple getting married. Write about that.”

Meredith and I are now like every other couple who walks into a county office in the United States and says, “We’d like to apply for a marriage license.” We are like every other couple who takes a deep breath and — though it will be difficult, and though it’s a crazy risk — dives into marriage together.

And that is what last year’s Supreme Court decision was all about, anyway. Legally, Meredith and I are now like every other couple who walks into a county office in the United States and says, “We’d like to apply for a marriage license.” We are like every other couple who takes a deep breath and — though it will be difficult, and though it’s a crazy risk — dives into marriage together.

Last year, Justice Kennedy had to argue to the nation that Meredith and I deserve “equal dignity in the eyes of the law,” that we deserve to be included in “one of civilization’s oldest institutions”.

This year, we just get to hold hands with each other and, while our nine-year-old daughter and our family and friends look on, we get to say “yes” to each other, to a life greater than any we would have led alone.

top photo by Chris Johnson on Unsplash

War Rooms

It is probably inevitable The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street, a new book about a large family living in New York City, is about real estate.*

Karina Yan Glaser’s charming middle-grade contemporary opens about a week before Christmas when the Vanderbeekers learn that they are about to be kicked out of their beloved Harlem brownstone apartment. The Vanderbeekers are a biracial family—Asian and white—composed of two harried parents, a trio of eccentric pets, and five children. The eldest are twelve-year old twin girls—thoughtful violinist Isa and impulsive engineer Jessie—followed by nine-year-old basketball playing Oliver, shy six-year-old Hyacinth, maker of crafts, and four-year-old Laney.

The Vanderbeekers have deep roots on 141st Street. Père Vanderbeeker has always lived on the block, and the children have solidified the clan’s presence.

The Vanderbeekers’ home—a humble red brownstone with a weathervane that spun on windy days—sat in the exact middle of the street. The brownstone stood out not because of its architecture, but because of the constant hum of activity that burst out of it. Among the many people that visited the Vanderbeeker household there was quite a bit of disagreement about what it was like, but general agreement about what it was NOT:

Calm

Tidy

Boring

Predictable

The Vanderbeeker household is, in its way, a hub of community life. While the parents scramble to pack up and find housing, the children devise several strategems to convince their reclusive landlord, whom they call “the Biederman,” to allow them to stay. Each ploy, each scheme, makes use of a Vanderbeeker’s particular talent and character; it showcases their place in the world, but also provides a snapshot of life in their larger community.

I loved it. I was happy to find a realistic, warm book about a close-knit biracial clan living in a multiethnic New York City. I was delighted that the Vanderbeekers could reflect something of my daughter’s experiences growing up in Manhattan. And, well, I found the novel tremendously comforting. For the next few weeks, I started looking for children’s books about big families who live in rambling houses.

I was happy to find a realistic, warm book about a close-knit biracial clan living in a multiethnic New York City. I was delighted that the Vanderbeekers could reflect something of my daughter’s experiences growing up in Manhattan. And, well, I found the novel tremendously comforting.

The stories I wanted to read had a few things in common: The families in these novels were almost always made up of one responsible sister—usually the eldest—an artistic sibling, a scientific one, and a young sibling who didn’t understand everything that was going on but arrived at simple solutions for ongoing family problems. The books were all written in the third person, with each section closely following one child as they pursued their talents and were allowed to ramble about making music or constructing elaborate structures unheeded and unsupervised by adults.

I did not grow up in a knock-down house. I didn’t run wild. I never called secret meetings with my sisters and brothers to figure out how to manage my clueless parents or our problems. The feelings these books evoke could almost be mistaken for nostalgia—until I remind myself that I didn’t grow up this way at all.

I read the Vanderbeekers, I read Jeanne Birdsall’s The Penderwicks, I read Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays and The Four-Story Mistake, about the Melendy family. I just started Eleanor Estes’s The Moffats, and of course, I have on hand Sydney Taylor’s portrait of a turn-of-the-century New York Jewish household in All-of-a-Kind Family.

As I went through—go through—these books, I have tried to think about why they are so familiar and comforting. I did not grow up in a knock-down house. I didn’t run wild. I never called secret meetings with my sisters and brothers to figure out how to manage my clueless parents or our problems. The feelings these books evoke could almost be mistaken for nostalgia—until I remind myself that I didn’t grow up this way at all.

There is a magical quality to the spaces that the children in these books inhabit. The Vanderbeeker children, for instance, creep out of their windows to meet on the brownstone’s roof:

The tiles made the rooftop welcoming and soundproof. Nevertheless the kids knew to tread in the same manner they did when visiting one another’s bedrooms late at night without waking their parents. They were certain the Biederman could not hear them, because he would definitely have said something about it. And not in a nice way, either.

Jessie Vanderbeeker has also equipped the roof with a Rube Goldberg-esque contraption that allows the children to pour water down through a series of seesaws, wind chimes, and spokes, to create a soft melody. It’s a nice touch, both beautiful and whimsical, and it reinforces the feeling of an old-fashioned kind of childhood.

One reason I find the Vanderbeekers and the Penderwicks and Melendys so compelling is because these books also show the ways that children have power in their environment.

When I try to pinpoint what I find reassuring about this book—all of these books—I consider that it is this image of the siblings meeting secretly in the spaces that they’ve created. Even if the kids struggle to find a place in the larger world, there is at least assurance of a place within a family—where the crushing fights get resolved, where adolescence shakes up certain assumptions but one’s birth order and the love of one’s brothers and sisters stays more or less constant. The structure of family is ballast.

And that is further reinforced by the physical spaces of the kids’ covert meetings. One reason I find the Vanderbeekers and the Penderwicks and Melendys so compelling is because these books also show the ways that children have power in their environment. The four Penderwick sisters can, after all, help their friend James, who wants to go to a prestigious music school. The Vanderbeekers can lure their reclusive landlord back into the community. The Melendys even discover a secret room in their attic, in the children’s space.

“Look how it goes: up to here, and then across to there, and then down again. And look, there’s a kind of a bulge on that side. Like a hinge!”

“Like a hinge,” repeated Rush, light dawning. “Creepers, Ran! Do you suppose it could be a door?”

In dream interpretation, they say that discovering a hidden room in one’s home is a sign of untapped potential—it’s the subconscious’s signal there is more to find within oneself. In The Four-Story Mistake, that extra room is real; the Melendy kids keep news of the room from their father and their housekeeper, Cuffy. It is a place they can hide and plan fierce campaigns. Similar spots—in crawlspaces, in enormous garden urns, in attics and in trees—and covert meetings exist in the books I’ve been reading. From these locations, the siblings effect change, and their grown-ups have no idea that these childhood war rooms exist.

When people talk about having things go back to the way they were, I think sometimes they have in mind the portraits of family life found in these books. And yes, there is a charm in reading about “simpler times,” in kids playing in treehouses and adopting strange dogs from the street—charming, that is, for certain classes of white, straight, cis people.

But for me, I think that the appeal of these books lies in the fact that the children are allowed to be powerful, and where the books themselves serve as a childhood space; the pages are the secret room.

When people talk about having things go back to the way they were, I think sometimes they have in mind the portraits of family life found in these books. … But for me, I think that the appeal of these books lies in the fact that the children are allowed to be powerful, and where the books themselves serve as a childhood space; the pages are the secret room.

Because despite outward appearances, the larger setting of these novels isn’t all sweetness and charm. The Moffats, by Eleanor Estes, published in 1941, is essentially about the Great Depression and its effects on a widow’s children. Enright’s The Saturdays was published in 1939, and that book contains uneasy mentions of Hitler and strife in Europe. By The Four-Story Mistake (1941), Enright’s Melendys have moved to the country and are actively raising money for war bonds. So much for nostalgia.

I can’t think it a coincidence that both Estes and Enright first published these kinds of stories during these fraught years. And I find it interesting that The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street, about a mixed-race family—a family whose existence could be considered political—who are not many steps from homelessness and economic ruin—is being released now. They are sunny books, but their optimism is tempered. They are hopeful books, but there are good reasons why these characters need hope. When there is a larger world of dark, adult issues, these novels remind readers that there are still problems that can be solved by the youngest, smallest, most overlooked people.

***

* I received an ARC of The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street via Netgalley.

top photo by Jerry Kiesewetter on Unsplash