Everything, Everywhere Under the Rainbow

What I have written below is much like one of my last PITT essays. It poured out of me after a difficult phone conversation.  So, thank you in advance, not Gentle but Angry Readers (oh how I wish we were all writing about Bridgerton-like gossip, fashion, and romance) for not just reading but also for being part of this understanding community that provides a forum to work through ideas and share heartaches.

The relationship with my best friend from graduate study in clinical psychology has grown distant, at first gradually because I had moved across the country, and then more dramatically four years ago when I asked her for help keeping my ROGD daughter from medicalizing at one of many pivotal times during the now seven-year struggle.

Because she and I used to analyze everything and everyone (to the annoyance of our one roommate who was not studying psychology), because we were both in psychoanalysis ourselves, because we studied child and adolescent development, because we believed in understanding life stages and childhood dynamics as a way to act wisely, I assumed that she would agree with, well, everything about how I saw what was happening to my daughter and so many other young people.

She did not agree at all but didn’t exactly tell me that.  Instead, she said she just didn’t have the bandwidth to explore it because Portland was an upsetting mess during the pandemic.  She also said she didn’t work with children or teens so couldn’t really help conceptualize, much less propose, ways to intervene with my daughter.  Later, when I pleaded with her for more of an honest response, she referred to the “gender queer” and trans clients in her case load whose “lived experiences” she supported and who suggested to her a different way of seeing my daughter.  And then she asked if I was getting enough support for myself.

I sobbed after this conversation.  But since I didn’t want to lose her as a friend and, perhaps more truthfully, I couldn’t bear to see the full degree to which this ideology has invaded even what I once thought was the best of minds, I didn’t take it any further.  I allowed our relationship to continue, fed now only by birthday wishes instead of deep conversations.

Until she got divorced.  I didn’t learn about the crisis in her marriage until it was over, and I hoped to be there for her even though I knew there were complicated layers behind her not having turned to me earlier.  Which brings us to the conversation that led me to write this.  After several unsuccessful attempts to meet in person on a trip out west, we set up a time to talk.  It began with updates on our kids, including my sharing that my oldest child is starting a graduate program in clinical psychology and is worried about not being able to do actual therapy when any issues of identity enter the room.  She bristled and said she didn’t understand that to be a problem but knows that we see things differently.  I gave a few examples, sounding to her, I’m sure, like a raving conspiracy theorist.  But I let it go and tried to steer us to discussing her divorce.

The brief summary of the painful end of her marriage was that her husband wanted to explore non-monogamy, and she wasn’t thrilled, but asked him all sorts of questions and communicated that she wanted to stay together but had to understand what he needed and what their new relationship might look like.  He couldn’t answer but talked about polyamory and thruples and “expansive definitions of marriage,” and it all seemed vague and scripted to her.  And then she learned he had already been having sex with other women.  For a while.

“So, it turns out it’s just a big mid-life crisis,” she said.  “And he’s assuaging his guilt and shame by telling himself and everyone it’s just the cost of his spiritual path right now, so anger from me or his children or regret in the future are the inevitable, even noble cost of being himself.”

Sound familiar?  Without even thinking, I let out an exasperated sigh, after telling her how devastated I was for her. Then I added, “This is age-old, right?  How heterosexual couples have to deal with different sex drives and desires as they age? But there’s something different happening right now.  To risk revisiting the topic that’s been treacherous between us, there are these words and concepts that you can’t analyze anymore — like you can’t ‘yuck someone’s yum,’ or ‘shame their kink,’ or ‘question their identity’ while they are actually acting destructively, hurting others and themselves.”

At first, she was silent, and then she made some combined sound of hmmmm/gasp/choked, dark chuckle.  Once again, I didn’t take it any further.  I didn’t say, Look, the world is not helping children who are afraid of puberty by promising them they can “pause” it or by telling teens who are uncomfortable in their bodies that they can jump ship to the opposite sex, and in the same way, your husband’s mid-life crisis was not helped by polyamory having its own flag to fly.”

Yes, as I have certainly been reminded of late, I know that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  But I’ll add that when everything has a color on the rainbow or its own flag, nothing is allowed to be questioned or seen as anything other than beautiful and deserving of acceptance, regardless of the developmental, psychological, and societal layers that we all used to understand until five minutes ago.