Friday, December 19, 2008

Leaving Your Old Life

When Lorrie and I signed up and started this blog for women like us, our intention was to reach out to, connect with and help and learn from other women who had lived a life like us before coming out. (i.e "the straight life" "the socially acceptable life")
One of the things I would like to discuss in leaving your old life is what you took with you, or left behind.
Independently, and before we met, we both either knew of or heard of women who had
A.) left their husbands and left the kids with the husband and moved in with their love,
B.) kept the kids and moved in all together with the new love,
C.) stayed with the husbands and kids and sought an "open marriage" or
D.) for lack of a better way to put it, continued to have a secret affair with their lover
and basically remained "in the closet" until the kids were grown.

Our side of the story is this:
If you have read some of our earlier posts, you know Lorrie and I live 2,500 miles apart. After we first met and fell in love, we talked about one of us moving across the country to be closer to each other. After I came out to my kids, I knew I couldn't leave just yet because neither of my children wanted to leave Reno. They were born and raised here and were in High School. I moved a lot when I was a kid, I know how hard it can be to make new friends and go to new schools, especially high school. I knew I should stay here until they were out of High School. It is only another year and a half, and I decided to get my degree in the meantime. Besides, Nevada colleges are a lot less expensive than Pennsylvania ones, LOL.

Lorrie's kids did not wish to move from their home either being also born and raised there. Soooooo, we fly back and forth as often as is possible. It is not easy, it is down right painful at times actually. But I know that in the end it will have made everyone's life easier and it, I believe, will stem off any resentment that the merging of the two families prematurely might have caused.

See, our situation is different than a man/woman thing, because the kids would have had to deal with not only moving to a new state, town and neighborhood, but the added bigotry of some folks, and they would have likely faced teasing and harassment from their peers about their two moms. If the kids had been willing to move, I don't think we would need to worry about their ability to deal with the bigotry. But when you add that to the fact they are where they don't want to be, we both felt it would be too much.

Now, before we came to this decision, we both wanted to just pack up, leave the kids with their fathers if they didn't want to come with us, and just start a new life together. I mean we really really were tempted and I even sent Lorrie Norah Jones's song "Come Away With Me" which was rather selfish of me now that I think about it. One of Lorries kids was just hitting puberty at the time and the youngest was only eight. Not a good time to have mom just pack up and leave.
But we were sorely tempted let me tell you. I think that for us, in the end, we made the best choice for ourselves and for our children. For ourselves, because we believed that if we hurt our children or the other's children, we could begin to resent that in each other, and it would end up damaging the amazing love we do have for each other.

But by the same token, we also understand the incredible desire, want and need to be with the one we love totally, completely and entirely and right now! And if we had chosen that path we know we would have been trying, like women who do choose to live together, to make the very best of very messy things.

I have come to realize that women like us are forced to make these very hard choices because it is that old "societies norm" kinda thing. If we had fallen in love with another "man" the choices are often more open. The pain might not be less, but the healing time I think is shorter. The husband can move out, you don't fear losing your kids so much, and if you do leave your kids, there isn't that "stigma" attatched to it that it was all about another woman. I mean, if that stigma didn't matter to us, we would have been "out" years ago, right?

So my seekers of truth and love, how has living in the closet affected you and yours? How hard was it for your ex, or present husband to realize it was "another woman"? And aren't you glad you don't have to be in that dark lonely place anymore? I know I am. I know that we have a ways to go to clean up the messes made by that dark place, but it isn't anything that can't be done now that we have seen the light!
Sphere: Related Content

Trevor Project

Digg Us