Busted Back to Poly 101

Editor’s Note: Every Saturday, we run a column by Maria Padhila on a relationship-based theme, usually focused on polyamory or what some call responsible nonmonogamy. In case you’re wondering why we do this on an astrology website, the answer is ‘just because’ — we’ve been on these topics since the very first days Planet Waves existed. — efc

By Maria Padhila

I couldn’t write anything last week because I forgot to be polyamorous.

I’m really sorry about this — for a number of reasons including that I couldn’t write the weekly piece — and I’m trying to get back on track.

A point that comes up over and over when people talk and write about polyamory is that polyamory is not just screwing around. It demands communication and honesty. If you don’t love, which means spending time and talking, you’re just screwing around. And communication and honesty are the things I forgot.

Last week was a race against work and creative deadlines. About the first, there’s nothing much I can do except, unfortunately, burst into tears when I’m longing to write a poem or prose, or just talk to someone who’s not in the world of wonk that dominates the Washington DC area — talk to someone who reminds me that there’s another world, a bigger world. I was also watching the Occupy protests bring to flower a few of the seeds I had planted for years, but I was unable to join in in any way. Instead, nearly all my time was sucked up by writing about, well, corporations and corrupt politicians, because that’s what I get paid for. And I don’t mean investigative reporting — I mean doing writing that makes them sound good. This is the split that is eventually going to kill me or make me crazy, and I’m going to have to figure out some way to stop doing what I’m doing to pay the rent and get paid for what I can stand behind.

So there’s dishonesty of that sort, always swirling around me. Then there was communication. Issac and I had not talked in two weeks when we finally got some time together to check in and try to make sense of what we were feeling, together. Ironically, this process is intimately tied to the calendar and specific times and dates. Any deep, spiritual and loving communication can only happen if we have the practical, day-to-day realities of when we’re going to do it solved. It’s not only because the men I love have extra doses of Virgo goodness — precision, attention to detail, the desire to plan and work for others, to serve. It’s also because it’s not just screwing around, even in the romantic sense. We have to keep it real, and for us, that means working closely with time.

I was fighting my way through the week in order to get to a regional Burning Man festival Chris and I go to twice a year. We’ve been doing an art project that usually includes some kind of open mic/poetry element as well as a sculpture to burn (he can actually build things like that). He was spending his time tearing up his hands on recycled wood and getting the rest of his body torn up by mosquitoes. Around the middle of the week, Chris emailed me a poem about jealousy. At the same time, Isaac was going around the house (during the few times we crossed paths during small gaps in our work deadlines) talking in that clipped, gruff way he gets when he’s feeling jealous and disrespected. I was bursting into tears and feeling like driving off a bridge into the Potomac at the prospect of having to beam my made-up face at one more Northern Virginia defense industry monster while asking questions about leveraging the benefits of the agile business model.

This is life as a hinge, defined in Poly 101 as “in the case of a Vee relationship, or similar dynamics in a more complex relationship, the ‘person in the middle’, more bonded to each end than they are to each other, is sometimes called the hinge. One can imagine the hinge being more widely spread the less connected the others are. Without the hinge, the others would often go their separate ways.”

I need to remember that a hinge is essential to a door, and honor that ability to open things up, to myself and others. But as you can see, the pressure is also on the hinge to hold things together. What does the hinge serve, the door or the frame, the box or the lid? It is impossible for a hinge to serve only one of the sides it’s attached to. But there is pressure. And if the others go their separate ways, it tears the hinge apart.

When he kindly posted his article on relationships in my stead last week, Eric included this piece of wisdom about jealousy:

Jealousy is not what it seems to be, and to love organically we need to get to the heart of the matter. Jealousy is an expression of deep attachment, and to transcend it we must approach it as a natural erotic force; in a sense, as erotic pain. We are all of mortal flesh and will not be with our partners “forever.” But we can be with them in any one moment, which is all that there is anyway.

I was forgetting to acknowledge the reality of jealousy, its power and its beauty. Chris’s poem, for instance, was about being jealous of the time others had had with me for so many years. And I was dismissing Isaac’s feelings as mere FOMO (fear of missing out) and not getting the complexity there, holding my hands over my ears, really.

Before I left, I caved into Isaac and told him I knew full well this wasn’t going right, but it was an unchangeable fact that I could not make time to talk about it. I spent an hour texting and crying between working, while he too was on deadline, as I also was trying to pack, cook and paint some details of the sculpture. He said he felt like what he needed — and what our family needed — was being put at the end of the line so that I could have fun. Instead of listening, I became defensive, as always happens when I fear my qualities as a parent are being called into question (which he wasn’t doing). We one-finger-typed ourselves into some kind of resolution, to be continued when he got home from work in the middle of the night and we both gave in to exhaustion.

“Please, just tell me we’re OK,” I said. “Are we all right?”

“It’ll be OK,” he said. “Go, and have a good time.”

I did. It was an extraordinarily beautiful, hot, sunny autumn weekend. We did a lot of building (our own and a little bit of helping out on another group’s massive temple), a lot of talking, a lot of strolling around hand-in-hand on the paths between the tents among the burn barrels and the colored lights and the thumping bass. Our camp was giving out organic fruit and honey mead. Several people who came by would ask Chris and I how we met, how long we’d been together. It was under the same kind of sun, in the same patch of field; I was sitting under my shade tent, eating some fruit and crackers for breakfast and reading Andrei Codrescu’s book about New Orleans, and a handsome man carrying an enormous bouquet of herbs walked by, and I asked him to come sit and talk with me. We ended up talking for the next 24 hours.

This weekend, religious and spiritual symbols kept flickering up, and not just in our sculpture (a grail). Saturday of course was Yom Kippur; at one point as we were building I took a break and wandered into the shade of the temple and looked into one of its interior rooms. A small group was gathered, resting on pillows, listening to a man read from what I later found was Yakov Rabinovich’s The Unholy Bible. At the very moment I looked in, he was reading the piece about Lilith, which gave me a chill — it’s an image I was working very intently with a few years ago in a series of poems.

Many had fasted that day, and around sundown, our camp brought a pot of spaghetti and a tray of fresh bread to another camp hosting a meal to break the fast. Someone had even brought a kugel, and a group came over dancing and singing, toting a giant jug of wine.

Chris and Isaac have similar obsessive, electric consciousnesses, and I often have to fight not to play mommy or sergeant or to try to keep them on track and on task. They’re adults; this is love, not my job; it’s good for me to check myself and see if I can simply live and flow with what happens. When I woke Sunday morning, I decided I wanted even more of a vacation. I told Chris I’d spend the day obeying orders and not arguing about when or how to do things. He added the provision that I wasn’t to flirt with anyone, which is difficult for me, especially in that environment. And particularly when I watch him with beautiful women, flirting and massaging their shoulders. (Chris has so many beautiful, interesting women in his life, he’s like a walking Eric Rohmer movie.) We were able to play with the jealousy factor, and I was able to become more aware of a lot of my reactions. For me, these kinds of things are more than games to spice things up — it’s a chance to live another life, have another perspective, and so see who we are more clearly. But, OK, they’re also hot, I’ll give them that.

Eric’s article also mentioned the importance of self-love, something else I’d been forgetting a lot lately. I’ve been neglecting running and doing yoga, both of which are essential to my health, physical and all ways. This weekend, I made the newbie burner mistake I hadn’t done in years, of trying to slavishly schedule in all the fun stuff but forgetting to schedule in some of my needs. Most of the weekend, I forgot or didn’t take time to eat or drink, and you don’t do that shit when you’re 50 years old and camping in hot sunny days and cold nights. By the last night, after we’d set fire to our sculpture, I had an evil migraine, one where it hurts so much you burst into tears and then hate doing that because every breath and tear makes it hurt more. I lay by our fire, wrapped in a blanket, and Chris watched over me, though I kept trying to order him to go off and have fun. By morning I looked and felt like Keith Richards, but the pain had mostly faded.

This week, despite our deadlines, Isaac and I have pushed in time to talk. Poems keep pushing their way in and taking up my time as well, but even though they make me sad and it is time I can’t explain the value of to anyone, I’m glad it’s happening. I am finally getting somewhere on the ones I’ve been working on about the South, the Civil War and terrorism during the civil rights era. Ironically, there has also been a major controversy during this burn on some of these same topics; it’s something that will change things for a lot of people for a long time and may change the very nature of the event. I have been going to this event for seven years, and I welcome change.

Chris and I both do the nightmare/PTSD flail in our sleep, and that’s partially the topic of a poem I wrote. We have wounds in common. Tonight, as Isaac ate dinner (which I didn’t cook, because I was working), he said: “I like your new poem, but it made me sad.” (I put many of my poems up on my personal blog.)

“Why did it make you sad?”

“Because it’s a sad poem, but also because I think I know who it’s about.”

I got up from the computer and stood by the table, stretching. “You were always loved as a child. What if I were jealous of that? I could resent you for that.”

“Do you ever think that that’s one of the reasons I love you?”

“Oh, no. That can’t happen. If you’re not loved as a child, it means you’re completely unlovable forever.”

“Maybe it means you need to be loved doubly as much,” he said, and laughed. “Which you are!”

The Store of Breath

Can those who never knew love as children
Ever truly love others? They tell us no.
But they’ve always told us no. We’ve never listened.
I remember times strangers set to care for me
Would try to tempt me with food, and I’d refuse,
Thinking it a trick. I am ashamed now of my rudeness,
As I was then of my need. Could this have been
A pleasure for them, I wonder, like the cat that pushes
His head into your hand, yes, he is wild but soft,
And he believes he’s the one who has surrendered,
But it is your hand that delights, you hold the secret
Of that moment of trust, it is a triumph and testament
To your patience, your even breathing, your ability
To keep a soft, appealing tone.

You have gone back to dreaming;
It is where you do your work, and you growl
At creatures you chase there. I slow my breath;
And smoothing my skipping pulse, soothe yours.
No one has truly loved us but each other,
But within us we hold centuries of lives, the source.