Voodoo Monogamy

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.

And New Orleans in July makes me think of Kate Chopin. In the society of her novella The Awakening, it’s perfectly OK for a married woman to be “attended to” by an ardent young man for a summer; it may even be OK to sleep with one such; but don’t take it (or your art) seriously (under penalty of death, physical or spiritual).

Summer rules, society rules, “what happens in Vegas” rules, the temporary hall pass — these aren’t anything new, are they?

There are some who can dwell fairly easily and naturally within these contradictions and ambiguities. That’s my natural tendency. Of course one can be a Catholic and a Voudoun. Others rail at hypocrisies and condemn the sinners, and others pretend their other half doesn’t exist: I’m a good Catholic, I just sneak off to visit the root woman once in a while when I really need something.

Everywhere I looked, I saw “evidence” that monogamy was just plain broke down. I opened up the Walter Mosely book I’d been looking forward to reading for weeks, and got into the voice of his latest series character, Leonid McGill. This is a New York City investigator, African-American, married to a Swedish woman in a currently sexless marriage, with three children. He and his wife both have affairs; both have recently broken off long ones, she because her lover was jailed for financial fraud, he because he felt he needed to pretend to be a better husband.

At the beginning of the book, he’s realizing he’s actually fully in love with his former lover, and it’s ripping him up. Only one of his children is biologically his — the oldest — and he knows this. He calls all three his children. His favorite is the middle child — biologically, not his. I’m repeating this because this is a kind of assurance and morality that makes for a fascinating character in fiction — and in reality, as well. There are parents all over raising children that aren’t ‘theirs’. And many of them would never think of them as anything but their own children, no matter what the DNA says. This, to me, is great nobility, and goes against how laws and biology are set up, with their imperatives toward proving true inheritance. We’re bigger and better than that.

This is fiction, but in reality, it’s happening all over, in all classes and races. People are raising children that aren’t their ‘own’, and they’re loving them and caring for them. Their hearts and spirits are that open. Whether they’re raising them in some way that I think is good for the future of the human race is another issue; whether they’re raising them to be hateful to certain people, or fear their own freedom, whatever, that’s for down the line. The typical family isn’t.

Another thing I see is that most girls will walk a path much more like Bristol Palin’s — sans Dancing with the Stars — than like Michelle Obama’s. That is, when you talk to or meet most women today, they’ve had the kind of checkered relationship history that would have been unthinkable in an earlier era: serial or parallel-track monogamy, divorces, kids, breakups, random hookups — and these aren’t “bad” people. They’re normal. They’re even held up as ideals by the most moralistic, allegedly Christian, allegedly conservative people in America, the Teabaggers.

Except it wasn’t unthinkable in an earlier era. It was happening then, too. The Bristol Palin path is nothing new — it’s been going on with the poorer rural whites and the poorer urban blacks I know from growing up and and from reading unwhitewashed history. You can see it’s been the norm for years. Stable, formal relationships are the product of privilege. And even among the privileged, the same thing goes on — it’s just finessed in a different way, so it looks stable from the outside.

The majority of people have been playing musical chairs, beds, huts, mansions and caves, all through time. So how on Earth did the Cleavers become the norm? Of course, it’s the combination of long and life-threatening imposition of religious rules and the fairly recent but frighteningly powerful consensual hallucination of American advertising and media. I’m left with the question that comes naturally from my training to follow the money: Who profits from maintaining the fiction that lifetime monogamy is the norm?

That’s something to figure out for later.

Isaac believes monogamy is not as far gone as I’m asserting. He’s from an intact family, and he believes it’s a construct with value. He doesn’t think its destruction is as widespread as I see. He wants me to go back and check facts and figures — so when I get back to home base, I will.

Chris was at a Burning Man regional festival and yesterday he finally came back on the grid. I was mostly worried that he was dead or in the hospital with all the heat and the traveling. There was a little worry that he’d met a brand new super-soul-mate and I would be relegated to the second line — dancing, yes, free to stop for a beverage or a chat at any given moment, true, but still. It’s an odd sensation to be so happy, so busy, with Isaac nearly every moment and yet having, on some parallel, underground track, the sense of missing Chris. I’d rather try to forget him for a few weeks, but that’s not possible, any more than it’s possible to put Isaac, or my daughter, out of my mind.

The guys and I went to an all-night party with camping a weekend ago. Each time we do something together I’m shocked anew at how generous, relaxed and gracious they both are. I’m a mess — shaky and hysterical with not wanting to ‘do it wrong’, not wanting to hurt either of them, wanting them to like each other. And they’re so cool. They’re secure. I marvel at it, the way I marvel at a person with great athletic skill. What’s it like to be secure? To walk through life that way?

The three of us came and left together, and hung out, and camped next door, but Isaac was without doubt the primary, and I spent most of my time and the night with him while Chris did his own thing. But the times when we’re all together are getting easier and more fun — more secure — for me.

My ideal? That we could all be together more. And be alone more, and in separate couples more. So you see — there might not be a way to reconcile all this without being torn. Being torn might be unavoidable. Being torn and confused and ambiguous might actually be the point.