By Maria Padhila
I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling… looking for the key to set me free…
– Joni Mitchell, All I Want
But it is not so lonely. In fact, this road is one that could be called oversupported. Isaac and I are on a sort of semi-work/semi-vacation trip that has landed us in New Orleans for a few days, then through the south and into Appalachia. While the rest of the world is analyzing debt structures and throwing pies and punching each other, I’m comparison-shopping voodoo stores and brass-funk bands.
This week, I had in mind to write about someone who is monogamous and partnered with a poly. I had in mind to write something about how not to be polyamorous, with all the mistakes and disrespect I’d seen and inadvertently done around the track in the past year. But here I am looking at the mono/poly blogger’s page and emails, and feeling stymied by her ambiguity — her path is still too complex, too confusing, for me to try to wrap up just yet. I need to correspond with her more, to see how her current conflicts play out.
Isaac and I actually got in an argument over the state of monogamy at dinner the other night while talking about whether or not I would write about her. I launched it with the statement that in thinking it over, I’m not sure that the typical monogamous long-term marriage is all that typical. The legal divorce rate is just the obvious example. But in all I’ve read of history and culture, and all around me today, there are so many ‘alternative arrangements’ that are nothing like ‘true’ monogamy, whether people want to cop to that or not.
The other day at the cemetery that has the three different alleged graves of Marie Laveau, the great voodoo priestess of New Orleans, I overheard a tour guide telling why one large white tomb of a prominent family was thought to be Laveau’s resting place: “Being a good Catholic woman, she couldn’t get divorced, but she lived separately from her husband and took a lover.” The tomb was that of her lover’s family.