By Maria Padhila
It hits me in the oddest times and places. I’m just pulling up to the school the other day, to pick up my daughter, and there it is: I’m actually doing this. This is really happening.
Later that night, when I went to see the acupuncturist, it happened again. She looked at me and said: “This is your magic. You made this happen. You’re surrounded by love now, and you thought that would never be possible. But it’s real. You brought this into reality.”
The next night, I had a long phone call with my best friend — the other best friend, the one who knows I’m poly. I was discouraged about writing, mostly, and many other things, and full of despair that I’d ever really get my work out there and get it seen. “There are so many sensationalist crap books out there,” she said. “All that I was a call girl, and I was a geisha stuff. Maybe your story is just too real.”
“I remember you talking about this before the person even came into your life — you were thinking about it, working it through, trying to bring it out into the open. And then the right person was just there.”
“You know,” she said, “I think people would accept someone being a crack addict before they’d accept being polyamorous. You know, the way all those right-wingers who are addicted to painkillers and whatever that stuff they’re taking is? That’s easier for people to accept. Because that’s not something they can control. People see it as something that just took over, that they couldn’t help.”