Free to Be

ahh... what nine weeks away from a religious institution can do for you. No guilt ridden thoughts at the moment. I actually feel like I can write more about my views. The oppressive environment I worked in caused me to reflect on situations in a negative manner. I can see how it influenced me to be very critical when I should be the least likely to be like that. As a social worker, I was taught how to take a nonjudgemental perspective, but because of my career change I seemed to have lost that part of myself. I don't want to be like that anymore.

When I realized I was a lesbian I never thought about being gay from a male perspective. I can look back on my relationship with Tracey and realize I had no idea even what a lesbian sexual relationship might consist of, much less anything else. Quite obviously, what I had experienced with her was as basic as possible. So if I had no idea what women were doing, I was all the more clueless about men. Now add in 7 years of daily religious devotional thought and you might began to see why I was not ready for all this knowledge at once. Toss in some ignorant media influenced hiv talk and I wasn't gleefully ready to accept gay relationships...umm..so how about a girlfriend attempting to get pregnant with her gay male best friend. hehe

I am so happy I didn't know Gretch one year earlier. If I would have met her at the beginning of my year I wouldn't have been ready. She was in the midst of attempting to get pregnant. She was almost a year into the process. (she has ok'd me writing about this) She was trying to have a baby with a gay male friend of hers. The first night we met she explained the whole thing to me because she was not into hiding anything. If I would have heard the story a year earlier I would have freaked out. There are many ways of attempting to get pregnant with someone else. You can go to a medical office and have an implantation, you can do the implantation yourself, or you can have sex. Having sex was not an option because they just didn't feel comfortable with it, but because they are both medical professionals they were comfortable with the home method of implantation and it was less expensive. This however, is getting way into a different topic. I know, this is the interesting stuff, but I don't think I am ready to discuss it quite yet.
The failed attempts had an effect on all of us. One of our other gay couple friends announced their second pregnancy a few weeks ago. This is hard on us, but not as hard as two years ago. I will get back to this.

An important event that helped me become more accepting was a night out in the city with six gay men. It was my own little qaf, if only for one night. I had an absolute blast that night while learning more about my own fears and prejudices.

It was February, Tracey had been gone for awhile and I was talking to several people through the personal ad and meeting some of them. I remember the winter was quite harsh, I had to cancel and reschedule all the time. This particular night came about because of a woman who wanted to go out with her nephew for his 21st birthday with a bunch of his friends to gay bars, but wanted to bring another woman along for companionship. I had my doubts about the whole evening. I had never met her before, she was definitely from a different background, education level, etc.. We didn't seem to have a thing in common and I was worried about these 6 other people I didn't know.
Finally, I decided that it would be all about going to gay bars, something I had never done before, I didn't have to become best friends with anyone, just have fun and try a new experience for once. I am really glad I stepped out of my comfort zone that night. Everyone was extremely nice and I had a great time my first time out to the gay bars in the city.
I thought I could post quickly, but this is going to be longer than I thought. I will cover the night out on the town in my next post.

We are leaving in the morning to go to Madison until late Saturday. This is kind of a mini birthday get away for Gretch's birthday.
So we plan on eating lots of Middle Eastern Cuisine like hummus, falafel, and Couscous. Umm, that would be Gretch, I will stick to the chicken and rice with a little hummus. Should be a good weekend. We have a birthday party Saturday night with our friends who just announced their second pregnancy, and one on Sunday for Gretch's sister.

I do have to start my ten hours at school next week. I hope upon hope that I do not backtrack on how well I have been doing this summer. I think if I just go in and do my work and not get hung up on socializing I will be ok. Pleasseeee God, I need a break in this!!