I've been sort of caught up in my own head lately, swirling around in my own thoughts and not having a lot of patience for conversation or really wanting to spend time with anyone else. I always feel guilty when I get like this, as if there is something wrong with me for wanting to be alone for a bit, like I'm somehow letting my legions of fans and friends down or something. As if. I think Mark is happy not to have to hear me talk quite so much, and nobody else really notices.
Anyway, one of things that happens when I get like this is that memories replay themselves over and over in my head. I feel like I must be supposed to be getting something out of them, learning something from them popping up, but usually I don't. This week, I'm trying to pay attention.
My friend M. and I started hanging out when we were about 5. It was not long before we were "best friends forever," and it remained that way all the way through elementary school. In what is now called "junior high," (but was still grade school when I was a kid, at least where I grew up), we started fooling around. Well, I don't know if started is the right word--we'd probably been fooling around all along, but we started doing it much more seriously once the hormones really started kicking. In the fifth or sixth grade, we were pretty much having sex. We didn't know we were having sex, because neither of us even conceived of the idea that two girls COULD have sex at that point, but looking back that is certainly what was happening.
It was really, really fun. We spent a ton of time together, and whenever we could get away (in the woods, at the creek, sleeping in sleeping bags in the yard late at night, whatever), we were doing it. There wasn't really any shame in it, but we knew, instinctively I guess, that it was not an activity we should share with our parents.
Then, one day over the summer (between sixth and seventh grade, maybe?) we were at my house when my parents weren't home. We were in my bedroom with the door open, and we were making out. We were both clothed, not very far into things, when my mom suddenly came home and caught us.
Things got really bad really fast. My mom was furious. She screamed and yelled at us, asking what were we, some kind of fucking lesbians (a word I did not know at the time, but I knew by the way she said it that it wasn't good), and saying that we should just fucking masturbate (another word I didn't know) if we were curious. Then she grounded me for the rest of the summer, took M. home, and said we weren't allowed to see each other anymore. Then when my stepfather came home, she told him what she had caught us doing, and he proceeded to say horrible nasty things to me about it for about three months.
I got the message very clearly, then and there, that if there was one thing I was not allowed to be, it was a lesbian.
M. and I continued being friends, and eventually my mom relented and let us spend time together again, although she was pretty nonplussed about it. She has never, to this day, brought this up again. Even two years later when a girl who was mad at me for some infraction I have totally forgotten put up graffiti on the walls of the locker room at my school pronouncing me a "fuckin lezzie," and I subsequently got suspended for throwing a baseball at said graffiti artist's head, she never mentioned it again. It was like there was so much shame in it she couldn't even bring herself to acknowledge that it had happened, so neither did I.
As we got older, M. and I grew apart. She did too many drugs and too little homework for me in high school, and I didn't like her other friends. But when we did hang out together, things were sexual more often than not. I was dating, and eventually sleeping with, guys at the time, and she was too, but this was something different. Something we never talked about, still have never talked about. Retrospectively, I guess we were ashamed, too. At the time, though, it didn't feel like that. It felt like having a sexy, scandalous secret that nobody else needed to know. It was just between us.
Well, I haven't seen M. for years and don't want to. She didn't turn out to be the kind of person I want as a friend, and knowing now what I didn't know then, I realize she was never a healthy friend or lover to have. She was manipulative, she was mean, and she made me feel small and weak and useless much of the time. But I loved her so much, and having it invalidated was really, really painful.
I'm not saying that means I "get" anything, or that I don't have heaps of heterosexual privledge, because I do. For all intents and purposes, I'm a straight girl in the straight world, and that benefits me in 100 ways I think about and 1000 ways I don't, every day. But my first love and my first lover was a girl, and I am simply not willing to be one more person who pretends that didn't happen.
*Title from Ani, natch.