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Hi! My name is Ellen, and I am part of a blended family. (Sounds like we're at some sort of substance abuse recovery meeting, doesn't it?) I don't know exactly how the people outside of my immediate family will feel about this blog, but I need an outlet. Being in this family is tough sometimes, and people being people, they don't always listen quite like you'd like them to, so I decided to use this space to do the talking. I hope you, dear reader, find something useful here. Or at the very least, interesting.
So first, a little background.
My mom thinks I carry a placard that says "I used to be straight but now I'm gay". I assure you, I do not carry such a placard (or any placard, for the record), but at a superficial glance, you could say that that is one way to look at it. For most of my life, I squashed, ignored, or barely acted upon my attractions to other girls. Boys were easier. And they were the 'expected' choice. I was pretty busy fighting all kinds of battles on other fronts in my life, and didn't ever feel like that was one I wanted to add to the list. Go figure.
So when I saw HER on the soccer fields a couple of years ago, I was not surprised by my attraction to her. I was, however, disturbed by how powerless I felt to get her out of my mind. There's all kinds of songs written about someone getting under your skin in a way that makes you feel like you can't breathe, you can't sleep, you can't eat, or do anything else expected of functioning adults because you feel so consumed by this person.
Well, that was me.
Let me back up a tiny bit. I got married to a very nice guy back in 2001. Although I had been ambivalent about having kids for most of my life, I found myself wanting to see what it was like, especially after we each lost a grandfather within a few months of each other.
(Side note: Don't judge. Not a great basis for deciding to have kids, I admit, but first of all, this is a place where I get to be totally honest, and second, it's not like I abandoned them or abuse them. I have my share of struggles with them, but overall, I think I'm a fairly good mom. More about all that in other posts. Now back to the story...)
So we decided to see if we could have kids, and lo and behold, we did. Two boys. Max was born in 2003, and Jimmy was born in 2006. We struggled. I could go into dissecting our relationship and everything that went wrong and caused it to end, but mostly, that's not what I'm interested in doing here. We were just sort of going along. We fought a lot, we didn't spend a lot of time together, we didn't have sex, and we were both pretty unhappy. I had been talking to friends about leaving for about six months when one day...
I saw HER.
And suddenly, my time line became clear. I had to leave NOW.
She was tiny – maybe five feet tall to my 5’8” – and had a body that I immediately wanted to die for. She had short, dark hair and a pixie look to her. She was also incredibly fast, nimble and lithe (did I mention that body?), and by far the best soccer player I had seen yet on those fields. She was a forward, and I was a defender, and she came whizzing past me with the ball, scoring a goal before I could even catch my breath. I dubbed her “Elfy”.
“Hey, Elfy,” I shouted, as she trotted back to her side of the field. “You just scored on me!”
The smile that she flashed at me literally took my breath away.
“Bullfrog’s - after the game!”, she shot back.
I almost wet my pants right there on the field.
After the game (her team trounced ours), the teams slapped high-fives in a line and muttered “good game” at each other. As she came past me in the line, she grabbed my hand and squeezed it, and my bladder nearly let go again. I casually asked one of my friends on the team what Bullfrog's was, and found out it's a local bar/restaurant. I sat in my car for 20 minutes debating whether or not she had been serious about meeting there. In the end, I chickened out.
I had no idea what her orientation or relationship status was, and I didn’t care. I just knew I wanted to be in her space.
I couldn’t sleep. I worked every day from my home office, but couldn’t concentrate. I lost my appetite and dropped 11 lbs in three weeks. I was dying to talk to her, know her, be in her space, get her attention – anything. I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
In the throws of this confusion and despair, I asked my husband to leave. This visceral attraction to my Elfy was a threshhold experience - one of those moments when you might not move forward in the direction that you think, but there is no way that you can go back.
After a few weeks of this, I was desperate to talk to her. I had shouted things to her or waved across the field any time I thought I could get away with it without being too obvious. I was terrified of her rejection, either because she didn’t want to be with me, or because she wasn’t gay. I wasn’t sure which would be worse.
And I wasn’t sure what “being with me” even meant. I was so tortured and confused by what I was feeling that my head spun. I just knew I had to talk to her – get to know her. Explore. But even “exploring” was undefined for me.
One weekend, we had a make-up game on Saturday and our regular games on Sunday. I went early to the Saturday game because after consulting the schedule, I knew her team was playing right before mine. Someone else on her team was trying to organize a team for an indoor league to start in a couple of weeks, and I signed up purely out of hope that she would be playing on it, too. I used talking to her teammate as an excuse to sit on the sidelines with her team, as their game was finishing.
It was cold that October morning, and many people were wearing long-sleeved shirts under their short-sleeved team shirts. My Elfy was one. I was watching her play, her red shoes darting up and down the field with seemingly tireless energy. She was oblivious to my stare.
At a pause in the game, she suddenly whipped off her team shirt, then her long-sleeved shirt underneath, down to her sports bra. Then she quickly put her team shirt back on. My jaw dropped open before I could stop myself, and I whimpered. The body that I had been fantasizing about was even more sculpted and beautiful than I had imagined.
One of her teammates was giving me a strange look, so I quickly cleared my throat and muttered, “I can’t believe she just took off her warmer shirt – I’m cold just looking at her!” I snorted a very un-cool laugh as her teammate raised an eyebrow and looked away. My face burned.
After the game, I waited to see if she would notice me and say hello, but she did not. I watched her out of the corner of my eye gather her things, and trot off to her sexy, black pick up truck – a Chevy Silverado.
I was so inexplicably crushed that I had to run to the bathrooms to conceal my tears from everyone. I felt lovesick and like I was on what I had heard people describe in movies – an emotional roller coaster. Those had only been trite words to me before now – something to scorn and reject loudly, even as I secretly wanted to trade my own children for the chance to experience it. Now here I was, on that proverbial roller coaster, and it was bringing me to my knees. As I rode my bike home after the game, I plotted my strategy. Enough was enough – I had to approach her.
The following day, I arrived early, as her team was again playing right before mine. I drove over to the field where her truck was parked, and parked my car right in front of it. I could see her standing at the sidelines with a teammate, watching another game. Theirs was apparently over. I ran to the bathrooms to compose myself.
As I walked back, as casually as I could, she seemed to be looking in my direction, so I smiled and lifted my hand in a small wave. She smiled back and waved back, and I giddily floated back to my car. She didn’t look like she was leaving yet, so I drove around to the field where I would be playing, and got out. She would have to drive past that field on her way out, and I intended to stop her.
I waited as casually as possible near the edge of the field, watching for her truck. My heart was hammering so hard that I looked down to see if it was visibly coming out of my chest. That didn’t seem very cool for what I hoped would be our first real conversation.
Finally she came driving in my direction, so I took long strides to reach the edge of the parking lot in time. As she passed, she looked in my direction and waved. I looked back at her, pointed my arm straight at her, and shouted, “Hey, Elfy!”
To my amazement, she stopped! My legs turned to water. I trotted over to her truck, leaned on her open window, smiled, and said, “Hi!”
I don’t remember much of what we talked about that day. Neither does she. We both remember smiling a lot though. And at the end of our conversation as I was getting ready to walk away, I patted the side of her truck. She says that’s how she knew.
And now here we are, two+ years later, madly in love and trying to figure out how to raise a blended family together. And that's where it gets messy.
Her daughter's name is Stella, and we'll just call my Elfy... well, Elfy. So now that you know the cast of characters, and a little background, I hope you'll come back and read some more next time.
