Celebrating (queer) love

a short meditation on delight

Hi Friends,

I don’t typically care for Valentine’s Day–the consumer-driven, all-pink-cringe day of love has always felt forced to me. But this year I felt more open to it–why not take a day to celebrate love, especially queer love? And on Friday, I did just that, complete with a delightful moment in the grocery store, browsing the overpriced bouquets with all the frantic men, when a bro sidled up to me and whispered, “Hey, just so you know, there’s some in a bucket over there that are only $35. These are all like $75.” As I left the store, with no flowers and some organic strawberries (to top the chocolate martini I settled on, in lieu of an overpriced pink bouquet–my lady likes sunflowers), I laughed to myself at the pleasure of being confided to as just one of the guys, trying to get her lady something nice at the last minute.

But today I actually just wanted to share a little piece of writing that’s not about queer love, but about mother-child love. But, I’m queer mom, so it’s still queer.

I was flipping through my journal, as I do from time to time, and came across the valentine that Catherine left me last year. It’s an envelope, mass-produced pink, but the valentine innards have been removed. The outside has been glued over with lined notebook paper, on which Catherine wrote in perfect Christopher Robin style–a lovely androgynous character, come to think of it–spelling and lettering: “Me and mom bothe like hugs. We alsow like camping, and trees. But the thing we moste like is eachothere.”

The perfect, simple truth of the statements fills me with a tingling tenderness, an immediate weight of love and laughter every time I flip to it.

It is the joy of having a child wrapped up in an envelope, in a place where I can touch it, handle it, look at the evidence of a most absolute miracle of being human–the pure delight of connection and the awareness of mutual delight–from the perspective and the hand of a child.

This child–now a year older–has hands that still will reach out to me in the parking lot or on a walk in the woods. They still fit perfectly in the envelope of my hand and seal inside so comfortably. She reaches for me not out of fear or for help walking as she may have in years past, but just the comfort and delight of walking together, the act of hand holding a sign of ease and familiarity with our bodies–this body that carried her body sealed inside, her body changing shape and taking form, a form that has never existed before, coming into being daily.

Inside the envelope is tucked a picture, distinctive Catherine–detailed and surprising. It’s a blond, short-haired woman, whom I presume to be me, and a long-, dark-haired young woman–her, I think. They appear to be the same age. Both are smiling with mouths closed, seeming fully anchored in inner laughter. The effect is accumulated by the eyes, which are closed tight–sharing a joke, I think, and savoring it. The sun is the only other thing pictured, taking up a fifth of the small page, and it shines brightly on them, radiating out from a deep orange core and growing brighter yellow as it effervesces outward

It feels right, somehow, that we are the same age. As if we could grow towards each other and come fully to a place where we could experience things from the same level.

…..

This short essay was inspired by my reading of Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, and my reading of the book was in turn inspired by Gay’s interview on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast, a beautiful and grounding conversation. In the book. Gay undertakes the ambition of writing an essay a day on something that brings him delight. The result is a hilarious, glorious, gorgeous meditation on the pleasures of living, in essays that move from focused attention on perhaps a small detail, and expand outward through association into the grandeur and grief and mystery that make up the atmosphere of our lives. I highly recommend the book, as nourishment to take in the joy of living in the midst of the toxins that we’re absorbing in these days.